Yesterday, I accidentally scheduled a post that included Ryan Lizza's email to me rebutting my initial inference that he approved of Mark Leibovich's collecting other reporters' emails to political sources in order, presumably, to publish them. I thought I had replied to him by emailing the following:

i will run this email with your permission. i would not dream of publishing it without. but may i ask what your position actually is?

In a midday rush in a hectic week, I clicked the save button rather than the send, and drafted a post for later in the day. Except in a second bungle, I didn't just draft it but scheduled it (bloggers will know the difference - but a draft is never automatically published and a scheduled post is).

Yesterday afternoon, I was at the Atlantic offices talking to interns, and off-grid. When I got back to the laptop I searched for a response from Ryan, and found none. I checked my sent email and couldn't find my email to him. I found it in the saved box and sent it - by then way too late. Then I got an understandably furious email from Ryan pointing out the extreme irony of my publishing a personal email in a thread that was precisely arguing against such a thing, and the bizarreness of an email asking permission for something that had already run. That was when I realized my second bungle - scheduling rather than drafting the post.

Of course, the email I accidentally and prematurely published was a simple rebuttal of an inference I made and was in no way embarrassing to Lizza and helped correct the record in his favor. If I have misread something, I try to give the author a chance to correct me. But that isn't the point here. By the rare concidence of two screw-ups, I violated the confidentiality of the exchange. I've apologized to Ryan. My only defense is that this has been a crazy week for me, as you might imagine with the Beast news, and distractions, pressure and producing 300 posts a week can sometimes lead to screw-ups. So I hereby apologize to Ryan publicly as well as privately. I'm still not clear where he stands on the Leibovich question. But he says he will write a post soon explaining.

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