Review: “How to Rule the World”

Theo Baker’s How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University is an engaging read. It’s also required reading for anyone in scientific publishing because at the heart of it is a scientific publishing scandal. You'll encounter familiar names and entities within a story about falsification, sleuthing, retractions, accountability, and academic shenanigans.

Baker is graduating from Stanford next weekend with a degree in history, but that wasn’t his plan when he entered college in 2022. The son of two accomplished journalists, Baker was planning on being a coder and pursuing whatever path that provided at Stanford, but was soon overwhelmed by curiosity about ongoings and events, joining the student newspaper within months.

In almost no time, he found himself reporting on the story of Marc Tessier-Lavigne, President of Stanford.

His reporting swept him into the world of scientific journals, scientific fraud, and academic hijinks. From Holden Thorp to Elisabeth Bik, we meet a lot of familiar faces on the road — and encounter a lot of the good and the bad of science and its trappings along the way.

Baker is a good storyteller, and there are plenty of layers and side trips. The book is festooned with the kind of jumbled early life experiences one might expect from a college student — awkward romantic encounters, toying with alcohol and drugs and barely surviving, competitions and creeps, and weird things happening on campus.

But Stanford is a peculiar university these days, so Baker encounters a special breed of college weirdness — billionaire hubris, racism, eugenics, effective altruism, and science fiction fantasies aplenty, validating other books like Adam Becker’s great More Everything Forever. (We also include some of this in our forthcoming book.)

Overall, this is a great read, proving that Baker earned his George Polk Award.

Also, as a former college newspaper staffer who recently talked to another not much older than Baker, the importance of training grounds like the Stanford Daily, the Daily Utah Chronicle, and the Daily Bruin — and hundreds of others — cannot be exaggerated. As Kara Swisher said recently, “The kids are alright.”

Which brings us to Santiago Campos, an 18-year-old journalist in the DC area who recently received the $10,000 Mike Wallace Memorial Scholarship at the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences’ 47th Annual News and Documentary Awards in New York. Scott Pelley, who was fired from 60 Minutes earlier this week, presented the award, saying:

God, we need young people like you right behind us. I know that Mike Wallace is looking down at you with pride at this very moment.

Baker’s book tells a sordid story about how people become craven, self-interested, and power-hungry, corrupting themselves for prestige and profit. Pelley did not, and suffered for it, as have others.

Maybe we need fewer Bari Weiss’ and more Scott Pelleys, Santiago Campos’, and Theo Bakers in the world, too — full-on adults who actually care about the truth themselves.

Highly recommended.