"Winner of the George Polk Award for his Stanford Daily reporting that led to the downfall of the president of the university, Theo Baker's How to Rule the World, an accounting of that investigation and a searing critique of the crony-capitalist, talent-scraping culture of Palo Alto. 17-year-old Theo Baker matriculated at Stanford to study coding, the lingua franca of this Silicon Valley base camp. He was immediately greeted by the elitism and wealth of the university, with its yacht parties and invitation-only classes like "How to Rule the World," where one student was funded by Sam Altman, and another was Phoebe Gates. The co-dependence between Silicon Valley and Stanford's undergraduate students defined the campus. Even while he embedded in the tech elite, Theo couldn't escape his love of journalism. He joined the Stanford Daily, where he wrote a series of groundbreaking reports about the questionable research practices of the school's president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a neuroscientist on the short list for the Nobel Prize, who then hired a top law firm and the largest P.R. firm in the world to take down a reporter at his own college newspaper. In February, 2023, Theo Baker was named the youngest ever recipient of a George Polk Award for his reporting, and by August Tessier-Lavigne had resigned. This up close and personal view of university life comes at a time when elite education that caters to the 1% is under intense scrutiny. Theo Baker takes us inside this world like no other, writing brilliantly on the vicious, amoral culture at the heart of Stanford"-- Provided by publisher.