【Atlantic】How Actual Smart People Talk About Thems...

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I once spent weeks on interviews for a magazine profile of a man who had won a Nobel Prize in medicine while in his 40s. Back in my college days, one afternoon our biology professor passed around Dixie cups full of champagne before beginning the day’s classroom lecture, because of news that he had just won the Nobel Prize. In decades of reporting on the tech industry, I’ve interviewed people—Gates, Jobs, Musk, Page—whose names have become shorthands for their respective forms of brilliance, plus several more Nobel winners, plus others who are not famous but deserve to be.

During a brief stint of actually working at a tech company, I learned that some of the engineers and coders were viewed as just operating on a different plane: The code they wrote was better, tighter, and more elegant than other people’s, and they could write it much more quickly.

I’ve had the chance to interview and help select winners of fancy scholarships. Recently, in Shanghai, I interviewed a Chinese woman now in her early 20s who became the women’s world chess champion at age 16—and we were speaking in English.

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