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Although hot takes on Hillary Clinton sprout across the internet, a true profile—with behind-the-scenes access to the candidate—is rare, a mark of Clinton’s wariness of reporters after a life spent at the center of New York Times investigations and as the butt of SNL skits. So when Rebecca Traister of New York magazine released a lengthy, in-depth piece this week, it laid out the one lesson that Clinton herself should take away from it if she wants to strip away the resin of years of icy relations with the press: give more reporters more access. Yes, it sounds painfully simple, but this campaign proves how badly she needs to switch up her strategy.

To her supporters and her detractors, Hillary Clinton is either accomplished or corrupt, earnest or morally bankrupt, a pillar of American politics or the anti-Christ sent down to destroy the Constitution. But broader questions about whether or not she is “likable” or “fun” always boil down to a query about whether she is really human. That’s the (fundamentally sexist) question that emerged last week in David Brooks’ laughable “What exactly does Hillary Clinton do for fun?” column, which supposed that if we discovered that Hillary crochets baby blankets or assembles 10,000-piece jigsaw puzzles of dolphins that the American public would rally more readily behind her. Americans don’t want to know the Clinton that a team of professionals has line-prepped and hair-sprayed. Unfairly or not, they want to see the natural woman.

In her reporting, Traister outlined a history of precisely why and how Clinton has shut herself off from the press over the thirty-something years she’s worked in the limelight. She fairly notes the that “It’s worth remembering that Clinton’s public identity was shaped during the feminist backlash of the ’80s and early ’90s, when saying that you didn’t want to bake cookies was enough to start a culture war.” And Traister knows just how harsh the press was when Clinton was more open. She writes, “Most of the traveling reporters are too young to remember the way Clinton was barbecued by the media from the beginning, labeled too radical, too feminist, too independent, too influential; dangerous, conniving, ugly and unf--kable.”

Clinton has prioritized privacy over accessibility—forsaking one professional virtue for a personal one. As many other reporters over the years have lamented, and as Traister describes at length, “A band of young reporters follows her, thanklessly, from event to event, and she gives them almost nothing. Unlike other candidates, she does not ride on the same plane with them … “ And while she regularly appears on morning and late night talk shows, Jake Tapper pointed out to her yesterday on his CNN show that “it’s [been] something like five or six months since she held a press conference,” which she avoided directly commenting on. As Hillary wrote to a friend in 1996, “I know I should pretend not to have any opinions—but I’m just not going to. I’m used to winning and I intend to win on my own terms.”