How to Think About Genius (Helen Lewis)

Pulling The Thread with Elise Loehnen

Elise Loehnen

Society & Culture, Religion & Spirituality, Self-improvement, Education

4.8 • 900 Ratings

🗓️ 26 June 2025

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In her new book, The Genius Myth, journalist Helen Lewis explores how and why we label certain people geniuses; and the impact this has on said geniuses, us, and culture at large. Today, we talk about our perception of the exceptional, and some of our more pernicious and dark misperceptions. For the show notes, head over to my Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, it's Elise Lunan, host of Pulling the Thread.
0:04.0	Today I'm talking to journalist Helen Lewis, who has a new book out called The Genius Myth.
0:10.3	Exclusively on Disney Plus.
0:12.4	It's hard and it's brutal and that's what makes it special.
0:16.2	The multi-award winning series FX's The Bear is back for a brand new season.
0:21.5	Upon my signal, unleash help.
0:25.3	And every second counts.
0:27.8	When that shows zero, this restaurant ceases operations.
0:31.8	FX's the Bear.
0:32.7	New season now streaming exclusively on Disney Plus.
0:37.1	18 plus subscription required season C's apply.
0:52.2	Hi, it's Elise Lunan, host of Pulling the Thread. On this show, we pull apart the web in which we all live to understand who we are and why we're here.
0:59.9	My hope is that these conversations spark moments of resonance and plant tiny seeds of awareness so that we might all collectively learn and grow.
1:10.3	Here is today's guest, Helen Lewis, on one of the genius myths that we'll get into today.
1:15.6	And I think that's quite a powerful thing too, because we want our geniuses to be extraordinary.
1:20.6	We don't want them to be living quiet little bourgeois lives where they're nice to their partners and doting on their parents.
1:26.6	We think that you should be wild in some way, abnormal.
1:31.6	But that, yeah, that becomes a licensing scheme for bad behavior.
1:36.0	In fact, it's worse than that.
1:37.5	It becomes taken as proof that they must be a genius because they aren't, quote-unquote,
1:43.2	normal.
1:44.3	Helen Lewis is a staff writer at The Atlantic who writes about culture and politics.
	...

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