Spencer Bailey

Yes, I agree 100%.

At Columbia Journalism School, you were assigned the beat of city gentrification in your early reporting, connected cupcake shops, urban development and neighborhood transformation, all

You said that initially it might have sounded trivial until you realized it was about class, race, and spatial politics.

Would you say that design initially revealed itself to you through sociology rather than aesthetics?

Completely.

Back to those stonemasons.

Yeah.

Through to that RW1, as they called it, the Intro to Reporting and Writing class.

I feel like that class in particular, or that beat anyway, which kind of led me all over the city into these neighborhoods that were rapidly developing, I reported on the first residential development in Bushwick with an indoor pool, and that that building was on the same block where just two weeks before I went there to report there'd been a double homicide.

I mean, these were the sort of clashes that were occurring in these neighborhoods between, like...

Poverty, violence.

In certain cases, it was like people getting pushed out because these new buildings coming in, a developer buying an old lot for dirt cheap, putting a pool in and all of a sudden you have a lot of cool like hipster kids want to move in.

So I was trying to get at those racial tensions, understand the sociology of it.

And it was extremely interesting for me to navigate my own personal identity through that as this, I'll just be blunt, like 6'3 waspy white dude from Denver.

Like, you know, like I felt that it was important to put myself in uncomfortable positions as a means of understanding myself.

my place as the author within that conversation.

I couldn't take myself out of that conversation.

It would do a disservice to the... I wasn't writing in first person, but I was approaching the reporting and the situations fully understanding my own identity as not separate from the situations I was reporting on.

During graduate school, you also interned at Vanity Fair under Graydon Carter.

What did that environment teach you about editorial ambition?