Helen Lewis

So I have brought The Genius Factory by David Plotz, which is the story of one mad eugenicist millionaire who decides that the way to solve all of America's problem is to get lots of Nobel Prize winners to donate their sperm and give it to couples to make babies.

Let me just shock you, doesn't go well.

A lot of the people turn out not to be Nobel Prize winners.

A lot of the people involved in it are very odd indeed.

And then when the press find out, the whole thing kind of melts down.

One of the only people we know who was involved with that is William Shockley, who won the Nobel Prize for his role in the invention of the transistor and later became an enthusiastic proponent of racial theories of IQ.

So it's a California story.

Let me shock you with all about that.

Yeah.

It's a classic California tale of sperm and entrepreneurship and eugenics.

Yeah, so those are my three.

Hello and welcome to another episode of Page 94.

My name is Helen Lewis and I'm filling in for Andrew Hunter-Murray who has this week sadly failed to develop vetting.

I'm in the Private Eye studio with Adam McQueen in Hislop and Sabah Salman, editor of Rotten Burrows.

The local elections are coming up and it's going to be a splintering, I guess, of Britain as people vote against Labour and the Tories where they're still standing.

What does the picture look like?

Because that is when Nigel Farage of Reform launched his campaign.

So he must be pretty confident of winning it or that would be quite embarrassing.

Why has Nigel Farage got better taste in music than me?

Nigel, I was going to say, coming into Right Said Fred.