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By Chris Boehm I never realized I grew up in a conservative home until I moved out of it. In 1991, I graduated from Webster High School in Webster, New York — a suburb of Rochester. We weren’t out in the hinterlands, but we were far enough outside of anywhere that hearing the name of the town
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By Allison Rowe We exist in a world that glorifies movement. Each beat of advancement, the rhythm of success, urges us onward to constantly pursue the next challenge, the next destination. Each triumph, however great, glows for only a moment before it's consumed by the need for more. The
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By Chelsey Tierney My first student loan, which I took out in 2012 at just seventeen years old, turns thirteen this year. For thirteen years I have carried this student loan. It has followed me through three different schools; a variety of internships, jobs, and cities; and more than one student
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By Ian Rosenzweig I’ve grown up in a divided America. My eighth grade classroom was a battlezone during the 2020 election cycle, when it became normal for peers to cut each other off because their opinions differed. Motivated by both ideology and a desire to preserve my friendships, I began to
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By Michael Tyler This essay was originally published on Michael’s blog I Don’t Know, and you can read the original version here. I moved to New York City to pursue acting as a sheltered 25 year old from Colorado and immediately got a job selling tickets to a local comedy club on the streets of
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By Rebekah Spicuglia Dear readers, One of the goals of Tangle is to expose you to a broad range of perspectives. Part of that work means being open-minded about views even (and especially) if they challenge your preconceptions or run against the mainstream consensus. So, you can imagine my interest
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By Gordon Hafslund I had just ordered a to-go pizza at a local pizza place when I found myself witness to an exchange between a newbie Christian evangelist and one of the restaurant’s non-Christian owners. It was a hard-sell effort by the new Jesus lover to “witness” and recruit him to her faith.
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By Deb Linne She looked so small in the bed, curled up in ten-out-of-ten pain, with a nasogastric tube down her nose and throat into her stomach, multiple IV lines with electrolytes, and other medications running around the clock keeping her alive. Her pancreas was failing, so inflamed that it
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By Jack Such ❗The opinions and perspectives presented in this article belong solely to the author, and do not necessarily represent the opinions or positions of the author's employer. This past election season was the first of its kind in modern American politics. I’m not even talking about the
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By Max Huibregtse I didn’t realize I was disabled until about six years after my diagnosis. I knew, of course, that I was ill — that I had a chronic condition, that I had had more doctor’s appointments in the last half decade than most of my peers had had in their entire 18 years. Unlike many
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By Jerry Phillips Back in the early 2000s, I was employed as a contract special investigator for the United States Office of Personnel Management. My primary responsibility was to interview individuals who had applied for security clearance that was required for their employment. The majority of
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By Stout Cortez This essay is being published on March 2nd, which means that we’ve successfully made another dismal trudge through the calendar’s worst month — February. Let’s state the plainly obvious: February sucks. The days are their darkest on December 21st, but we had three months of slowly