Faithful readers, as well as people I’ve met casually on the street, probably, will know that I am a huge fan of Nathan Rabin.
I have interviewed him. I have written a tribute to the inherent empathy of his work. I have shamelessly pilfered his ideas, not once, not twice, but three times.
Frankly, this level of fandom approaches the creepy.
But I can’t help it: Rabin is among the best writers around in pop-culture world, whether that world feels like recognizing it or not. He’s a big part of why this site exists in the first place (which might be damning with faint praise, but there you go).
All of which is why I’m personally excited that his brand spanking new website is live: Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place. It promises to be a veritable cornucopia of Rabinisms, and you should support it.
As he lays out in the intro, Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place will feature variations on the many of the different kinds of obsessively detailed pieces he’s produced over 20 years on the scene: deep dives into the ouevre of Weird Al, sharp looks at terrible films, a personal blog, new movie reviews, commentaries on fatherhood, and basically whatever the fuck he feels like.
Will it be perfect? Rabin isn’t so sure:
That alone has been enough to keep me from venturing out on my own before, a fear that I won’t be good enough, that I won’t be professional enough, that without responsible adults heroically standing in between the world and my messy prose, I’ll be exposed as a rank amateur who got lucky yet grows less lucky by the day.
I’m going to concede upfront that there are going to errors and typos and misspellings in Nathan Raebin’s Happy Place. Hell, I misspelt my own last name in the previous sentence. Pretty sloppy, eh? But you know what, I’m okay with that. I want the world to see me as I really am.
Frankly, that’s a dude who can’t can’t always be counted upon to correctly spell his name.
But in an increasingly brutal marketplace of click-driven ideas, empty listicles, and internet articles tackling the great quandaries of our time, like why so many cartoon characters are yellow, Rabin’s site promises to be singular and honest, as his work and voice have always been.
Give it a look, and then all your money.