Welcome to the moment of challenge.

I'm so glad you could join us.

Thrilled to welcome back, Helen Lewis, staff writer at The Atlantic, who is also the author of a new book, The Genius Myth, a curious history of a dangerous idea. Helen Lewis, thank you so much for

joining me. What possessed you to write this book? Yeah, it's a really good question and one

that I've asked myself several times in the last couple of weeks since it's come out,

because it's such a giant topic, isn't it? You know, lots of people

have been writing about genius for centuries now. But I just really like the idea that this was a word

that lots and lots of people were using, but maybe none of us really had any idea by what we meant by it.

I think that's just kind of inherently interesting when you have words that are so heavily

debated. And underneath that is a concept, again, that people can't agree on. You know, you have words that are so heavily debated. And underneath that is a concept, again, that people

can't agree on. You know, you have, you know, people in the 18th century really have big

struggles with trying to kind of define stuff. They're, for example, very interested in originality,

which I think we now completely think that genius is about originality. But that's, you know,

that's not its original meaning at all. So it also allowed me to get into some of the stuff that I'm about originality. But that's, you know, that's not its original meaning at all.

So it also allowed me to get into some of the stuff that I'm really fascinated about,

about celebrity and the history of intelligence testing and, you know, all of this kind of

stuff is also really fascinating to me. Yeah. So what was the original meaning of the term genius? Well, so the ancient Greeks and Romans,

you know, you had a genius. You know, it was a guiding spirit. You weren't a genius. You

had one. And I think that sort of changed. It's hard to pinpoint exactly, but by the time of Samuel

Johnson's dictionary, which is 1600s, then it has become

the definition of a genius is a man of superior faculties. You know, that you can at that point

describe someone as being a genius. And at the same time, you know, you've just come out of the

...