Spencer Bailey

micro-choose, I guess you could say, like be your own best editor.

She was very encouraging on that front.

And I guess also I would say,

understanding how to tell a story by starting with the W's, the classic W's of the who and the why and the what, but really, I think, getting to the heart of the why.

The one story that always comes to mind for me from that time was she assigned me to profile the college's stonemasons, and Dickinson was founded in the late 1700s.

It's

got a limestone campus.

Almost all the buildings are the same limestone.

It's very kind of Hogwarts vibes or something.

But it's beautiful, and they still maintain this limestone tradition to this day.

And what I found really interesting was like, wow, there's two guys who show up every day, day in and day out, to make sure the stones across the campus look good.

and are maintained.

And so I got to go to the old limestone quarry with them.

And for me, it was like understanding another layer of this, you know, you walk these past these walls every day, you don't think about the maintenance required for taking care of them or the intent that was behind what built the campus in the first place.

I guess you could say that was my first piece of design journalism.

After graduating, you arrived in New York City in September 2008.

And the day after signing your first lease on an apartment, Lehman Brothers collapsed.

You described entering the city with ambition, but no roadmap.

At that point, what were you hoping to do?

I wanted to work in publishing, media, magazines, whatever that looked like back then.