Non-Fiction Book Club

The instant New York Times bestseller • Named a Best Book of the Year (So Far) by New York Times, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Apple Books

“A rigorous, self-assured, propulsive, at times terrifying portrait of a dweebocracy that ‘sets the agenda for the planet’ . . . in the tradition of Michael Lewis’s Wall Street chronicle Liar’s Poker.” —The New York Times

“A romp and rollick of a read.” —Andrew Ross Sorkin, #1 New York Times bestselling author of 1929

From Theo Baker, winner of the George Polk Award for his investigation that brought down Stanford's president, comes a revelatory and gripping account of Silicon Valley hubris.

Slush funds. Shell companies. Yacht parties. This is life for Silicon Valley’s favored teenagers.

Seventeen-year-old Theo Baker showed up for freshman year at Stanford University as a tech-obsessed coder. It seemed like paradise. There were Rodin sculptures next to nuclear laboratories and inventors lounging with Olympians. But Baker soon discovered a culture that embraced corner-cutting, that vested infinite excess and access in the hands of kids with few safeguards to catch bad behavior.

Stanford, he realized, was less a school than a business. Its annual budget was nearly twice that of Harvard or Yale and higher than those of 116 countries. The product? Students. Especially those special few identified as the next trillion-dollar startup founders. For them, there were secret societies, “pre-idea” funding offers, and social calls from billionaires, all with the expectation that these geniuses would soon join the ruling elite.

At the helm of this business was Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a superstar neuroscientist and wealthy biotech executive. But when Baker joined the student newspaper and started poking around the Stanford president’s record, he discovered never-reported allegations of research misconduct in studies published across two decades bearing Tessier-Lavigne's name.

Only one month into college and thousands of miles from home, Baker began receiving anonymous letters, going on stakeouts, and tracking down confidential sources. High-powered lawyers and public relations teams were hired to attack his reporting. Stanford opened an investigation into its own leader. And by the end of the year, Tessier-Lavigne was out as president.

This is the incredible journey of a reluctant teenage reporter who uncovered a story that shook the scientific world and became front-page news across the country. It is also an unprecedented inside view of the students learning to rule the world—and what they’re learning from those who already do.

How to Rule the World is a shocking, hilarious, and moving debut, showcasing Silicon Valley’s training ground as never before.

New York Times bestselling author Anne Sebba's moving biography of Ethel Rosenberg, the wife and mother whose execution for espionage-related crimes defined the Cold War and horrified the world.

In June 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a couple with two young sons, were led separately from their prison cells on Death Row and electrocuted moments apart. Both had been convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage for the Soviet Union, despite the fact that the US government was aware that the evidence against Ethel was shaky at best and based on the perjury of her own brother.

This book is the first to focus on one half of that couple in more than thirty years, and much new evidence has surfaced since then. Ethel was a bright girl who might have fulfilled her personal dream of becoming an opera singer, but instead found herself struggling with the social mores of the 1950’s. She longed to be a good wife and perfect mother, while battling the political paranoia of the McCarthy era, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and a mother who never valued her. Because of her profound love for and loyalty to her husband, she refused to incriminate him, despite government pressure on her to do so. Instead, she courageously faced the death penalty for a crime she hadn’t committed, orphaning her children.

Seventy years after her trial, this is the first time Ethel’s story has been told with the full use of the dramatic and tragic prison letters she exchanged with her husband, her lawyer and her psychotherapist over a three-year period, two of them in solitary confinement. Hers is the resonant story of what happens when a government motivated by fear tramples on the rights of its citizens.