While rummaging around on what my buddy, Managing Photographer Bill Kelley, likes to call the "Interweb" for information about the history of Minneapolis' West Bank for last issue's Line or Two, I visited the site of Nomad World Pub—a colorful site chockablock with images of maps, bottles, African masks, soccer balls, taxidermied animals, and other things presumably intended to evoke a rough-and ready globalism. I also noticed that the bar had hosted a reading/publication party for a book with the title Future Cities, assembled by a local group with a blog/online mag called The Tangential.

Thinking that this might be a work of urbanism by a gaggle of designers—doesn't "The Tangential" sound like a firm from Los Angeles or Amsterdam that the Walker would invite to one of its design symposia?--and thus eminently Lineworthy, I clicked into the Tangential site, only to discover that the people behind the blog/mag of that name were not designers, and their book was a collection of fiction rather than a compendium of essays on urban design. And yet they were Lineworthy in another way—they were an insouciant collective of twenty- and thirtysomething writers, many of them employed, day-job-wise, by our cooler marketing firms, and some teaching at high-end local universities.

Tangents

And the Tangential blog itself? A very large compendium of little essays and "listicles" generally combining an intimate knowledge of pop culture with a dead-on sense of local hipster mores and folkways. And chief among those mores and folkways, it's clear, is an extremely cheerful irony about those mores and folkways: hipsters spotting and chuckling at hipsterspeak and hipsterthink and (social- and mass-) media-driven junk culture, while kinda claiming it and kinda loving it and pretty often gently denouncing it.

If you're looking for one place to go to learn what well-educated, extremely alert Millennials in creative industries in our two shiny regional cities are like, this could be it. The first four items in a post titled "How to Write Something for Tangential" by Chrissy Stockton kinda tell the story:

"1. Pick a zany topic that utilizes the niche interests of 20something Minneapolis ravewavers with internet presences (20sMRWWIPs). This includes things like Gchatting while at work, sleeping around, alcohol, indie bands, relevant blogs + bars, Four Loko, Adderall, and LCD Soundsystem/Radiohead.?

2. Incorporate as many of these interests as possible into a ‘top x’ list, how to guide, where are they now, or ‘what your favorite x says about you,’ etc. format.?

3. Include something innocuously offensive like ‘boobs,’ ‘sex,’ or ‘alternative lifestyles.’?

4. Mention someone that 20sMRWWIPs know and love but is generally unknown outside this circle. Top consideration: Choire Sicha."

(Choire Sicha? Former Editorial Director of Gawker Media, current honcho of The Awl.)

A sample of posts: "How to Name Your Plants," "Social(ish) Media Founders in Order of Attractiveness," "Me and My Taylor Swift Pizza Box," "Leisure Activities of Céline Dion While Recovering from Sinusitis in Las Vegas."

Getting Real

The tone here is dazzlingly inconsequential, but the Tangentialists have serious sequences in their collective genome too. Founder Becky Lang, who's on the creative side of uber-cool marketing agency Zeus Jones, has a post called "Socially-Conscious White Hipster Hip-Hop Bugs Me: Here's Why," in which she points out that slamming the materialism and macho posturing in rap is "something of a white privilege. It is easy to be secure with having a shitty purse if your status in society is not regularly questioned. Secondly, part of the reason (I assume) that hip-hop involves so much masculine posturing is because, historically, society has emasculated black men."

And Jay Gabler, the site's founding editor, is a mainstay at The Daily Planet, where he covers the arts, and a cultural studies professor at Macalester. His comparison between The Casual Vacancy, J. K. Rowling's post-Potter "adult" novel about small-town life, and Garrison Keillor's latest compendium of Lake Wobegon stories is sharp, telling, unironic, and humane.

There are other full-hearted gems among the snarkiness—and some of the snarkiness is pretty funny. Check it out, even if you're not a 20sMRWWIP.