Now that everyone's in recovery from last night's premiere of the much-heralded HBO series Girls, directed and co-created by and starring twenty-five-year-old wunderkind Lena Dunham, 2012 can officially be proclaimed the Year of the Early Twenty-Something White Girl Whose List of Myriad Accomplishments Makes You Want To Crawl Into a Hole With a Bag of Cheetos and Take a Nap. The latest ETSWG to make you feel bad about yourself is twenty-four-year-old Sara Ganim, who recently won the Pulitzer for local reporting for unearthing the Penn State scandal as a staff writer for the Harrisburg Patriot-News. In other news, today I figured out how to videotape myself lip-syncing to "Du Hast" using the Photobooth on my office computer, so I guess everyone's a winner here.
Ganim is not the youngest reporter to ever win the Pulitzer (that would be twenty-three-year-old Jackie Crosby, who won the award in 1985), but she makes up for her youth with a level of journalistic experience that would make Jimmy Olsen pee himself from shame. She's been working as a reporter since she was fifteen, and since graduating from Penn State in 2008, she's held a number of positions at the AP and the Centre Daily Times before landing her current job as crime reporter for the Patriot News. Two years ago, she broke the story that a grand jury was investigating former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky for sexual-abuse allegations, and has since received numerous awards for her coverage, including the prestigious George K. Polk Award and the 2012 Distinguished Writing Award for Local Accountability Reporting. She's even been honored by Newsweek and Glamour, receiving the title of one of the 150 Most Fearless Women in the World from the former publication.
If reading Ganim's resume makes you feel like a completely worthless assemblage of flesh and sinew who has accomplished nothing in life, I would advise you to stop reading, oh, somewhere around here (via Poynter):
Though her official title is crime reporter, Ganim’s work might be better described as investigative. She has said that she wakes up at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. most mornings and starts working. “I have a police scanner on my nightstand,” she writes on her personal site. “I fall to sleep and wake up to the morning news. I work 60-hour weeks digging and investigating, chatting up sources, and peeling back layers until I find amazing stories."
To put this in perspective, think about what you are doing most mornings at 3 or 4 a.m. Probably scratching your genitals and drooling on your blanky whilst dreaming of a nude Ryan Gosling fixing you a turkey club. Which is funny, 'cause that's when Ganim was reporting the same story that the Baltimore Sun once compared to the Watergate scandal.
The moral of this story is that we're all disgusting, each and every one of us. Disgusting, I say. All of us except for Sara Ganim and Lena Dunham should be rounded up and put in a home for the terminally useless and lazy. Now let's go start our bands or learn how to make that cool new mixed drink we read about in Esquire or whatever the hell it is that young people are supposed to do.
