Editor’s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.
Editor’s Note: Theo Baker ’26 has not written for The Daily since his sophomore year (2023-24).
We all know Stanford is a place like no other, but it’s easy to forget just how strange it is from an outsider’s perspective. In his book debut, “How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University,” Theo Baker ’26 gives the common reader a peek into our Silicon Valley-dominated culture, all while providing insights into the bureaucracy that even the average Stanford student might be unfamiliar with.
Bright-eyed and technologically savvy, Baker arrives at Stanford hoping to code his way into a better world. The son of prominent journalists Susan Glasser and Peter Baker — who write for The New Yorker and The New York Times, respectively — he resents the idea of replicating his parents’ lives, defined by breaking news and family time cut short. Instead, he decides he will pursue computer science, a field in which he can “be [his] own person,” he writes.
He quickly learns that Stanford, and perhaps Silicon Valley as a whole, is a well-oiled machine — with young people being the products. Baker gets his first real taste of this reality when he is interviewed for an invitation-only unofficial seminar called “How to Rule the World,” where “high-agency individuals” participate in a pyramid scheme of networking and unlock “latent talent.”
Baker’s book is as much about Stanford — as a place, idea and institution — as it is about what it means to be young. Baker is constantly searching for belonging and meaning amid frat parties and Coupa meetings, and these experiences ground the reader.
“I wanted to be special,” Baker writes. “I wanted to be validated and doing things.”
We learn about the tragic death of his grandfather just two weeks before freshman year, his long-distance romantic relationship from high school that ultimately ends, the mundane tasks of buying a bike and even a terrifying opioid overdose at Coffee House (CoHo).
Readers come to navigate Baker’s freshman year through the lens of stories he wrote for The Daily. These include his notorious investigations of William Curry — the imposter student who lived in the Crothers basement for a year — and articles about former president Marc Tessier-Lavigne (MTL) which exposed him for overseeing research that used falsified data, leading to the president’s resignation. Baker takes readers along for the thrill of chasing a story bound to break national news and make him the youngest-ever recipient of the George Polk Award.
The first of Baker’s articles for The Daily centers on a story I’m sure all Stanford students have grown tired of hearing about: the “War on Fun.” Baker recounts Eurotrash being cancelled his freshman year and the nothingness that followed in its place, noting that every fraternity was placed on probation in 2022. His writing about the “War on Fun” has gained popularity nationwide.
I find the book’s claim that the University administration was “determined to break” fraternities on campus disingenuous, if not dangerous. Many fraternities were on probation for behaviors like sexual assault, hazing and racism, and skipping over this nuance contributes to a harmful culture of erasure. There are ways to talk about Stanford’s strange social scene without ignoring the ugly realities of what these organizations often bring.
Otherwise, I enjoyed reading Baker’s debut. For many of us, when we take a step back from the grind culture that permeates every corner of Stanford, it’s easy to see how ridiculous — and morally corrupt — some of our norms are. Baker pulls at these threads until you can’t help but laugh at the fact that no one in his CS 107 section said they cared about ethics or that students are often categorized into being “technical” (read: worthy) or not.
I can imagine how a Stanford outsider would be enthralled by Baker’s vivid descriptions of Stanford’s quirks: Binary Bomb, rollouts, the Panda Express at Tressider. For me, it felt cozy; it was nice to read a story situated in one of the places I know best and even nicer to learn about things happening that even I am too much of an outsider to access.
My main qualm with “How to Rule the World” has nothing to do with the quality of writing, nor how interesting the stories were. Rather, the irony of Baker writing the book itself struck me throughout: Baker sets out to expose Stanford’s underground realm of students and tech oligarchs who want to “rule the world,” without giving much attention to the fact that he seems to want to do the same, or that he’s been given the tools to do so from birth. The only mentions of possible nepotism in the book come from sly remarks, in which Baker implies that only his haters care about what his parents do.
The irony of “How to Rule the World” is that Stanford’s tech-culture is so omnipresent that it spreads to supposedly “noble” fields like journalism and other humanities. At times, it seems like Baker exhibits the very behaviors for which he criticizes his peers — self-importance and upholding hierarchy, to name a few — to get ahead in his own career. It’s hard to fully buy into the idea that one could truly write objectively about Stanford while still entangled in its webs.
I have a feeling many Stanford students will pick this book up, if for no other reason than to have a laugh at seeing the words “Full Moon on the Quad” and “Eurotrash” in print. It’s no exaggeration to say that Baker and his reporting have altered Stanford greatly, and, as a journalist, it was valuable to hear it all from the very person who wrote those groundbreaking hits. Above all, the book serves as a reminder that none of us — even the Polk awardees — can truly walk away from Stanford unchanged.