Amorality and greed at Silicon Valley’s favourite university A student journalist examines the culture at Stanford July 2nd 2026 THERE ARE good reasons to be sceptical of this book. The author, Theo Baker, is just 21 years old. His subject is his Stanford undergraduate years— a time that feels important while living through it, but is rarely of much interest to anyone else. Yet “How to Rule the World” is worth reading. It follows in the tradition of “One L”, Scott Turow’s account of his first year at Harvard Law School, and William F. Buckley’s “God and Man at Yale”, a jeremiad against that university’s leftward drift. Mr Baker offers an inside look at a world-shaping institution. Stanford has “a strong claim…to be the greatest university in the world”, with an annual budget larger than that of 116 national governments.
Behemoths including Google and Netflix were founded by its students and alumni. The book has three strands: the skimmable bits about parties, friends, how and to whom Mr Baker lost his virginity; a journalistic story about his investigation that compelled Stanford’s president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, to resign; and a scathing look at how Stanford’s ties to Silicon Valley have hollowed out its moral core. Ken Auletta, a journalist at the New Yorker, called the university “a giant tech incubator with a football team”. Many faculty members have grown rich as early investors in their students’ ventures; venture-capital (VC) firms looking for the next big thing have their eyes on undergrads. A student “with sufficiently promising ideas or tech now has no problem raising seven figures on their own”, Mr Baker writes. Some do not even need an idea: “If you have the right pedigree, the VCs will offer you money without so much as the glimmering of a possible startup in mind.” Obtaining the right pedigree is essentially a matter of reputation, so the competition to be seen as successful, to get into the “Stanford inside Stanford”, as Mr Baker calls it, is intense. Students cut ethical corners; adults entice these gifted, driven teenagers by telling them how special they are. The traditional goals of a liberal-arts education—self-knowledge, critical thinking, inculcation into a shared culture and history—fall by the wayside. Mr Baker, intending to go into computer science, instead finds a home at the student newspaper, the Stanford Daily. Initially he did not believe journalism was for him, but perhaps he had a genetic predisposition towards it: both his parents are superstar journalists and Mr Baker, too, turns out to be a fearless reporter. His investigation into manipulated data in papers co-written by Mr Tessier-Lavigne made him the youngest-ever winner of a George Polk award, a prestigious journalism accolade. One reason for Mr Baker’s success at Stanford was a lack of competition: as the Daily’s faculty adviser laments, “very few students care much about journalism.” When everybody wants to get rich—and countenances “a system that embraces ‘just a little bit of fraud’”, as one fellow student
quipped—nobody wants to look too hard beneath the shiny surfaces. In decrying Stanford’s thrall to money and power, Mr Baker’s book also testifies to the importance of good local journalism to hold that money and power to account. ■ For more on the latest books, films, TV shows, albums and controversies, sign up to Plot Twist, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//culture/2026/07/02/amorality-and-greed-at-silicon- valleys-favourite-university
The Herculaneum scrolls are starting to be read The technology is dazzling. Whether the prose will be is another matter July 2nd 2026 It looks like nothing: a lump of coal, at best. A blackened fir cone or piece of excrement. It looks so underwhelming that other such lumps had, over the years, been destroyed or thrown away. This particular lump went by an underwhelming title, too: curators called it “PHerc. 1667”. But at a recent press conference in Naples, PHerc. 1667 became one of the most famous underwhelming-looking lumps in classics. The eruption of Vesuvius in 79AD made two very different kinds of classical writing famous. The first was the letters of Pliny the Younger, which contained his account of that eruption. These are minor masterpieces of descriptive writing, with words like “evil cloud”, “zigzag flames” and the even more evil-feeling “descending cloud”. They are also masterpieces of
dramatic irony. The reader knows what will happen; Pliny did not even have a word for “volcano”. They are, rightly, some of the most-read writings from the ancient world. The second category of writing was the 600-1,000 scrolls that were covered by the falling cloud as it travelled, at 100kph and around 400°C, over a vast library in a villa in Herculaneum. The villa was rediscovered by well-diggers in 1750. Since then the finest scholars of every era have tried to read its scrolls—and largely failed (though some were read). In the 1820s Humphry Davy, a British chemist, tried a mixture of force, iodine, chlorine and heat to get to them. (“The papyrus smoked,” wrote Davy.) Most were bibliographic Gordian knots: to open them was to destroy them. Until now. On June 25th the Vesuvius Challenge, a scholarly collaboration, announced that all of PHerc. 1667—1.5 metres of scroll—had been “virtually unwrapped” using a combination of a particle accelerator (to scan the script) and AI (to decipher it). If the remaining 400 closed scrolls (and pieces of scrolls, as some are in bits) are read, then perhaps 3m new classical words might appear. It is a dazzling achievement and could, hopes Brent Seales, the co-founder of the Challenge, create a “renaissance” in this area.
To understand why new works matter so much, it is necessary to understand how many old ones were lost. This is hard: from Christopher Nolan’s film of the “Odyssey” to Emma Thompson’s forthcoming “Iliad” (based on Pat Barker’s feminist retelling), the ancient world feels so noisily present that it is easy to forget how much has gone. But it has: only an estimated 10% of all classical literature has survived—and only 1% of all Latin. Worse, it was not lost evenly: Christian copyists did not like any ancient writings that were rude, lewd, sceptical, sexual, drunken or queer (which is to say: most of them), so the modern sense of the ancient world has been skewed through censorship. Whenever a cache of ancient writings appears, it thus not only offers writing —but a potential rewriting of history. The graffiti in nearby Pompeii revolutionised classics (by showing that the Romans were rather filthy). The Dead Sea Scrolls revolutionised early Christian history (by showing that the Christian claims were not as unique as all that). The cracking of Linear B, a script, revolutionised the public’s understanding of Bronze Age Greece (by showing that the Mycenaeans kept obsessive records of their goats). Whether Herculaneum will be as revolutionary is not clear. There are promising signs: so far every text the scholars have found is “completely new”, says Federica Nicolardi, an assistant professor of papyrology at the University of Naples. Every classicist has their wishlist of what might yet turn up: a poem by Sappho, a lost tragedy by Aeschylus, a lost book of Livy. They are, alas, unlikely to have their wishes granted. The library, which is thought to have belonged to Piso, Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, was evidently magnificent. Its breadth was perhaps less so: most of what has appeared so far is Greek philosophy. One “virtually unwrapped” scroll was entitled “On Vices”—which sounded promising. But it was by Philodemus, a classical philosopher whom even classical philosophers are not all that interested in. James Warren, a professor of classical philosophy at Cambridge, thinks people have “got a bit carried away”. They are, he says stoically, unlikely to get the texts many are “thirsting for”. Though more scrolls may yet be in there: like Pompeii itself, much of the villa is still unexcavated. The Vesuvius Challenge is famous for being a collaboration between very old, simple technology (papyri) and very new
technology (AI). To get to those other texts, archaeologists may have to resort to an even older, blunter technology: the spade. ■ For more on the latest books, films, TV shows, albums and controversies, sign up to Plot Twist, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//culture/2026/06/29/the-herculaneum-scrolls-are-starting- to-be-read
Messi, Mbappé, Ronaldo: this World Cup belongs to the superstars Notes on talent management from a star-dominated tournament July 2nd 2026 They freeze. They see red. They quail in the face of history and sky a penalty kick. Sometimes the best footballers flop at World Cups. On the grandest stage they can turn out not to be the best after all, champions of hype rather than talent. Not in 2026: this competition has been dominated by the sport’s titans. Their performance offers lessons for the management of superstars—and a glimmer of cosmic justice. Lionel Messi, Argentina’s idol, scored six times in three games to claim the record for lifetime goals in World Cups. By July 1st graceful Kylian Mbappé of France (pictured) had netted six too; Norway’s rampaging Erling Haaland had struck five, and Vinícius Júnior, a Brazilian livewire, four. At 41,