Theo Baker

So, yeah, I mean, I really never wanted to be a journalist, which is part of why all of this has been so strange.

I was like, I'm going to go 3,000 miles away from home.

I'm going to study computer science, do the exact opposite.

But, you know, my maternal grandfather, Gramps, he and I were very close.

And he passed away just a few weeks before I started at Stanford.

And

He wasn't a journalist by profession, but dispositionally, I think he was.

And I've never in my entire life heard someone talk more about a college newspaper than he did.

He used to sit me down on his knee and tell me tales of his own campus newsroom.

So I showed up and I thought this would be something I did to feel connected to my grandfather.

And things spiraled pretty quickly, I guess.

Yeah, I mean, that's the other thing, that this year was...

This was, like all freshman years, many things.

Both of my grandfathers passed away that year, as did a very close family friend.

The ordinary rhythms of freshman life, losing a long-distance relationship, going through the travails of Weider courses, that all of these things were coexisting with the investigation that would see the president of Stanford sending his high-powered attorneys after us and whatnot.

Look, it was at many times an uncomfortable year, and I'm not interested in stories where the edges are sanded off.

And so you will definitely see in the book that there are places where, you know, I'm clearly making very imperfect decisions about my personal life, and, you know, I am this blundering 17- and 18-year-old kid, you know, at the same time as I'm also doing this reporting and everything else is happening.

Well, the war on fun story was was both my introduction to student journalism, but also my introduction to the defining theme of the book, which is, you know, appearance versus reality.

Right.

So students came up with this name for the war on fun, basically to describe the sort of increasing bureaucratization of art.