Our brave (?) new world

While I do grieve the world I grew up in, I also feel a compulsion to try to understand the one we are living in now. Thus I took the trouble to read and summarize here the recent biography of Elon Musk and the remarkable book Careless People that described the inner workings of Facebook. This week I took time between World Cup games to read How to Rule the World, by Theo Baker, who just graduated from Stanford University. It details his experience as a student journalist pursuing a story that led to the resignation of the Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne. It told me more than anything I have read about the current state of elite higher education and about the practices of our new economy.Some of what I learned did not come directly from the book, because Baker has lived his whole life in a particular environment and takes a good deal of it for granted. The 18-year old kids admitted differ in many ways, but they have one critical thing in common: they have spent their whole…