Twentysomething lands managing editor gig at The New Yorker

Today I learned that a 26-year-old woman landed a managing editor gig at The New Yorker. Amelia Lester, an Australia native, graduated from Harvard and began at The New Yorker as a fact checker. She left to edit for the Paris Review. Now she’s back and the envy of, um, well, me at least.

Things may not be perfect in the media world right now, but God damn it, if we’re not hopeful and we don’t at least try to make things work, well then we deserve our plight, now don’t we?

An anonymous contributor published this heart-breaking piece on Gawker today. It really got me down. I may not be an official member of the media in my current position, but my title includes the word “editor” in it and I’m going to jump on the first opportunity I find to get back into the writing game. Or at least that’s been my plan as of late. I thought that as a recent journalism graduate I was in one of the worst positions possible amidst the media meltdown.

There I was, a rookie ball player waiting on the bench and so ready to finally get my first chance step up to the plate. I made the cut got placed into the line-up, and by some grace of God I got a hit and ran my little heart out, slid into second base and MADE IT. Then some old fart who followed me in the lineup hit a grounder to third base and I was tagged out. Cut from the game.

The other rookies and I never even got our chance! Yet Gawker’s quoting a guy in his early 30s working for a glossy Conde Naste publication who said, “All these young kids still wet from college complaining about the lack of media jobs—at least they’re young enough to figure something else out. It’s the guys like me, who’ve been doing this shit for a decade and don’t know how to do anything else, who are fucked.”

You know what I have to say to this bitter old man? First of all, If you’re gonna call me a young kid “wet from college” I won’t hesitate to call you old. Second, STFU. Srsly. You want my job? I’ll teach you how to do something else.

Here’s what a “friend” says of Ms. Lester: “she got this far the old fashioned way — hard work and smarts.” Hopefully with enough motivation and journalistic prowess all of us “wet from college” (what does that even mean?) can slowly but surely replace all the whiny old farts.

Teabaggers

I love being able to talk about teabaggers. Tee hee hee. Today was Tax Day. I guess that’s the best day to describe it? I honestly don’t think any description that I could whip up in less than 20 minutes would do justice. Today was crazy. Basically, people decided to protest the fact that they have to pay taxes. First of all, here’s the best response to the protests that I’ve seen today:

Moving, right? I enjoyed it. I tried to hop over to some of the Texas Tea Parties today, but I ended up being a little late to both of them. Curses! Still I was able to experience them (I feel) through the twitpics and news coverage of them that I saw throughout the day. Here were my favorite two twitpics:

This one’s from KT Musselman. @karltm #Austin #teaparty best sign? Got fascism?

This one’s from Elise Hu, @elisewho A wide shot of all the marchers headed set from the Capitol to dump tea into the lake.

The Statesman’s multimedia coverage of the event was pretty awesome. And I just have to say, I would have enjoyed the whole ordeal much more if there were more people dressed up in their proper 18th Century tea party attire, but whatever.

I’ll leave you with the words of Paul Krugman and the footage I was able to catch — but I must warn you it’s not too thrilling since I arrived late to the City Hall party AND the marching party. I guess Conservatives haven’t heard about being fashionably late.

But the charge of socialism is being thrown around only because “liberal” doesn’t seem to carry the punch it used to. And if you go back just a few years, you find top Republican figures making equally bizarre claims about what liberals were up to. Remember when Karl Rove declared that liberals wanted to offer “therapy and understanding” to the 9/11 terrorists?