Snug as a Gun
Max Parness contra Theo Baker’s How to Rule the World
THE NEW CRITIC
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CONTRA
Max Parness is a 25-year-old foreign policy analyst living in Washington, D.C. He studied Russian History at The University of Chicago.
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REVIEWED How to Rule the World by Theo Baker published May 2026, from Penguin Press, 336 pp.
It is hard to imagine a reporter having more success out of the gate than (the then 17-year-old) Theo Baker. By the time he returned home after the autumn quarter of his first year at Stanford in 2022, the Stanford Daily journalist had already broken three major stories: the university’s heavy-handed suppression of parties in the post-Covid years; its failure to act against a con man who had lived illegally in student dorms for the better part of a year and allegedly harassed a female student; and the revelation that a series of papers published by then‑university president Marc Tessier‑Lavigne (almost always referred to by his initials, MTL) showed a clear pattern of research misconduct through the use of doctored images.
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