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Hello, my name's David Ronserman and this is past-present future, the History of Ideas podcast.

In today's episode, in our new series on the history of bad ideas, I'm talking to the writer and

broadcaster Helen Lewis about the bad idea at the heart of her new book which is published today.

It's called The Genius Myth.

We're going to be talking about all the many things that have gone wrong

and can still go wrong with the idea of the genius, usually, but not always, the boy genius.

What's Wrong with Genius?

And I want to start not by asking you why genius is such a terrible idea, but when are you happy to use it? Because I know you don't want to abolish it.

This isn't like a fatwa against the idea of genius. So just to start with, so we can frame this

before we really dig in, when are you comfortable calling a person or a thing, a work of art, an event, genius? When do you find yourself saying that was genius? Oh, I find myself saying it all the time. It's such a casual word. You know, why is the Apple store, does it have a genius bar, which is filled with, you know, people who are quite good at tech support, but there's no need to over egg it, really. But I think it's better to use it about ideas. And actually, I crib this from a way that somebody, I think it was Dan Trilling. I used to work with the New States once said it was much more effective to talk about racism in this way. that instead of branding people a racist, which was a

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