How to Rule the World
An Education in Power at Stanford University
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
'A thrilling story of journalistic investigation . . . Baker’s undeniable talent might make me sick with envy, but the truly nauseating thing here is the moral void he sketches at the heart of the tech world' Sarah Ditum, The Times
A searing critique of the crony-capitalist, talent-scraping culture of the Stanford elites, by a brilliant young journalist
When seventeen-year old Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University one brisk September morning, its manicured lawns, palm trees and sparkling fountains, all under azure Californian skies, provoked in him both wonderment and a sense of anticipation. After all, this legendary campus, where Rodin sculptures rub shoulders with nuclear laboratories, is where Silicon Valley was birthed. Its research park housed the headquarters of Facebook and Hewlett Packard, with venture capitalists a stone's throw away, ready to fund the next promising teenager's startup. With an annual budget eclipsing the budgets of 116 countries, yet a reputation for being laid-back and innovative, Stanford seemed like tech heaven. Instead, Baker discovered a cultural rot.
In this astonishing debut Baker recounts his freshman year mission to uncover the secrets behind Silicon Valley's training ground. He describes the Stanford inside Stanford, a strange, money-soaked subculture of infinite excess and access, afforded only to those special few students plucked from the crowd and expected to create billion dollar companies. And he documents a culture of getting ahead at any cost, of cut corners enabled and embraced. A culture that went to the very top. Baker's investigations for the student newspaper would soon place him in the impossibly difficult position of investigating his own university's president, a famous neuroscientist with a squeaky-clean reputation. By the end of his freshman year, after Baker's reporting revealed two decades of unreported research misconduct allegations, including in a study that claimed to have found the cause of degeneration in Alzheimer's patients, Stanford's president was forced to resign.
Both coming-of-age story and clear-eyed exposé, Baker takes us inside this elite American world like no other, revealing the ambitious, amoral, and at-times laughably absurd truth behind the institution training kids to rule the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this incendiary account, debut author Baker details how a tip he received as a freshman student journalist at Stanford University led to the resignation of university president Marc Tessier-Lavigne. Baker, the son of political reporters Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, enrolled at Stanford in 2022 planning to study computer science. He joined the student newspaper as a hobby, but it became something more when a friend alerted Baker to a years-old blog post suggesting that one of Tessier-Lavigne's published neurobiology papers included a falsified image. Pulling on that thread, Baker reported a series of stories alleging that Tessier-Lavigne was complicit in publishing deceptive and misleading scientific research on multiple occasions. The university assembled a committee to investigate Baker's claims, and in 2023, Tessier-Lavigne resigned from his post—shortly after Baker became the youngest recipient of a Polk Award. Far from braggadocious, Baker is frank about the toll his reporting took on his social life and his faith in higher education; the book is at its most fascinating when detailing his disillusionment with the "rot" at the heart of academia that prizes the appearance of success over the truth. It's a confident testament to the power of independent journalism from an author with a bright future.
