This is the demand that I received from Helen Lewis on August 24, 2022. I wanted to make sure that Lewis understood (see: First Email to Helen Lewis), but there was absolutely no way that I was planning to speak to her.
This is a demand that I speak to her; at first I thought it was a troll when I saw her photo, and by the tenor and tone of the “request”. It is incredibly unprofessional, for starters, and pales in comparison to the emails that other interviewees. This demand is lazy, unprofessional and it should be beneath how The Atlantic conducts outreach. For people in the art world, my work email is fairly easy to find; if she couldn’t find that, that was a red flag that Lewis’s research skills were weak and an indicator she was not up for the task of covering the audio transcript, much less speaking for me.
For those that are unclear about that — and many were online, including Matt Ygelesias — what a demand is.