The Paper's Amanda Lorber Begins Journalism Career With Bitchy Email
Um, dag. We knew we liked Amanda Lorber, the go-get-'em star of MTV's bittersweet study of a high school newspaper The Paper, but we didn't know we liked her this much. Recently some uppity so-and-so (from a fuckin' Columbia newspaper, natch) wrote a nasty article on Lorber, calling her "overbearing and annoying" and citing her "crippling self-consciousness and a terminally unfulfilled desire to be liked." Lorber saw this as an unfair and unqualified attack, and responded with an acid-tongued, well-worded email. And it's awesome!
To the piece's author, Alexandria Symonds, she wrote:
You, Ms. Symonds, are obviously a fundamentally bitter woman. You degrade the work ethic and academic values of a 17-year-old in order to cure your self-consciousness and upset at perhaps never being recognized for your work when you're through with "The Specator." In fact, if my staff hadn't been excitedly 'googling' every article written about our (national television) show, I would never had come across your disgusting piece.
Hah! And:
postscript: I might have been "too young to subject" myself to doing this television show, but apparently, I'm not too young to be disparaged and intensely criticized by you.
"postscript"?? Oh, that's just terrific. Pooh to you inevitable naysayers who will cluck (justly, probably) that Lorber returned as baseless a personal attack on Symonds as she received. This was a private email (well, initially) so all the vitriol and biliousness is forgivable. (And never mind that Lorber maybe did seem a trifle desperate and lonely on the show).
Also, I could barely form a cogent thought when I was seventeen, mostly because I was too busy cutting school and furtively smoking cigarettes outside the Mass. College of Art (how tortured!) Lorber, on the other hand, writes thoughtfully and coherently. She has a bright future ahead of her. It's too bad she's going to NYU, the place where good old fashioned youthful ambition turns into a fetid, sour soup of bobo snobbery. Rise above, Amanda!
