the smell doctor who was 'too woke': dr. ally louks

and reported by the wonderful Theo Henderson. He began the podcast while living on the streets of LA and it's grown significantly during that time, but remains the only podcast that tells stories that affect the unhoused and tells the stories of the unhoused while continuing to center their own perspectives and experiences. We've been nominated in a web category and we need your help. If you click the link in the description, it goes directly to our category. It's

literally two clicks. It's a tight race, so I would really appreciate it if you both gave us a vote and also checked out the show. You can do both at the link and the description and Inhale deeply Baby. Here is our doctor Ali Luke's episode if you were to give up any of your five senses, which would it be, statistically one in two of you just decided probably my sense of smell. And I am honestly with you there. I think I had a roommate once who truly did not have a sense of smell, or a

very dull sense of smell. Maybe he was lying now that I'm saying it out loud. Either way, the place smelled terrible and it made my life a living nightmare. And it turns out that a lot of the reason why you might have been so quick to forfeit your sense of smell might have something to do with an extremely powerful myth that humans have a very sense of

smell compared to other mammals. And to be clear, what may be clear, this is a myth that I believed until like six days ago, but that is not actually true. According to a twenty seven research paper from Rutgers University professor John McGann, as, it turns out, humans have a sense of smell that is arguably as acute as mammals that we think have a keener sense of smell than

we do. And while his numbers are generally thought to be overstated, McGann published in twenty seventeen that we can identify close to one trillion separate sense as opposed to the ten thousand that's commonly cited, and to introduce a returning villain from our last series. Part of the reason that this misconception around smell has become ingrained in our consciousness is because of one Sigmund Freud. Professor McGann said back in twenty seventeen.

But as more time and funding has been put into this line of study, it's become clear that our species reputation as bad smellers is definitely false and possibly a misguided way to make us feel better than the other mammalian girls. Basically, a de emphasis on smell seems to be part of how humans have been propped up to be better than other species. In reality, that's not just far from the truth, but we rely on our sense

of smell far more than we seem to realize. For the last week or so, I've been reading a book called Smells, A Cultural History of odors in Early modern Times by French writer Robert Mushambled. Definitely got that wrong, and with all due respect to the author, most of this book PARPs on the history of people being obsessed with the smell of their own parts and whether they or their spouse's pussy is stinky or not. And if this is something you think about a lot, I guess

I recommend the book. But within this book I genuinely learned a lot about the fundamentals of smell that I had completely misunderstood or have been miseducated on. Heard the author smell is just as much, if not more, connected to learned experience as it is to natural instinct, and he argues it's the only one of our senses to

be truly learned. It's also been speculated that our sense of taste heavily relies on our sense of smell that influences the smells that we're drawn to or gain pleasure by, and has a hand in explaining why the smells we find pleasant can be so different, and whether you believe in horny pheromone sense or not, it influences the smells that we're repulsed by as well. That is to say, with enough convincing, your nose can and is trained to

distrust someone else by their smell. And while some of you are shaking your heads until they fall off your neck, there is an argument that there is really no such thing as a bad smell. There are instead smells we learn through experience to interpret as bad, whether this is for social or survival purposes, and this can lead to encouraging or helping to form any number of societally induced discriminations. Linked to our sense of smell is a strong tradition

of classism, as well as racism and xenophobia. But for the purposes of our guest today, I'm going to zone in on one particular aspect of the socialized learning of smell, how your nose can tell you to hate women, and to be clear, the way that most texts about how misogyny and the sense of smell are intertwined, and there's not many define what a woman is is extremely myopic, and by that I mean these texts generally define women

as people with wombs. I hope you don't need me to tell you that a person with a womb does not a woman make And if I do have to explain that to you, how did you find my podcast JK Rowling? Please turn it off? But in Mutchambled's work in particular, we are trained to see women or as the case may be, people with wombs, historically subjugated in a few distinct ways by encouraging disgust or even inventing smells around menstruation and a specifically.

also sometimes dismissed based on their smell. Throughout time, there have been associations with excess perfume in the West, categorized as smelling slutty, and there's also been writings of rich women's farts smelling better question mark and please don't get me started, because I do not want to get into it. But yes, there is a huge amount of weird poetry going back five hundred years or more about how pussy is stinky, but I like it. Shut up, I'm kidding.

If you listen to the end of the episode, I will share one of these disgusting poems.

can be a real challenge in the modern age. Muchumbled argues that our pushing smell aside as a powerful sense is very intentional.

the more crucial these lived connections become. Because while social norms dictate the way that one interprets the scent of a woman out a cheating.

butts smell better than fertile women. This type of speculation spread misogyny and xenophobia at once, with a different author from this same era saying, quote, the arsful of an Italian woman could only be a sewer unquote, and I took that personally. Menstruation has long been encouraged to be seen as a site of terror and evil, Its connection to implied life or deathmongered as a way to scare dumbasses for centuries and counting, particularly in centuries where Western

religion reigned. This is from sixteenth century writer Lavinous Laminius.

what we're either doing, being subjected to, or both. But if the last week of my life has been any indication, it's the kind of thing you can't unsmell once you've noticed it. We're subtly signaled on how to feel about a character in media, written or otherwise all the time based on how they smell. And I'm typing this while I frantically apply perfume to my wrists out of self consciousness.

I'm not saying let's stop showering. I'm saying that we lead by our noses more than we think, and it's something that it's going to take years to fully understand, because not only is the present history of smell important to our daily lives, there's a few crucial people in this field arguing that it's just as crucial to the future.

And that brings us to today, a day where there is, from what I can tell, more being written about the cultural history of smell than ever, and they're there is less public encouragement, particularly online, to engage with the humanities in this way than in years prior. So keep your

nose down if you know this one already. But what happens when a young woman celebrates her PhD on how smell has been portrayed in literature to distinguish racial class and gender prejudice a young queer woman at that on the absolute cesspool once known as Twitter dot com. It went really well, Doctor Allie Luke's aka the student who went viral for her thesis paper on smell being too woke.

Your sixteenth minute starts now join Welcome back to sixteenth Minute, the podcast where we talk to the Internet's main characters see how their moment in the spotlight affected them and what that says about us and the Internet. And this

week we are visiting a pretty recent story. One you might have heard of the tale of doctor Ali Lukes, who ended up on the wrong side of the Twitter algorithm after committing the heinous crime of completing over a decade's worth of higher education studying an underappreciated but critically necessary intersection of science and the humanities. How dare she?

an exceptionally difficult time to be a student. The example we're talking about today is Allie's one that is centered on cyber attacks fueled by anti intellectualism, misogyny, and very likely bots. But it's far from the only uphill battle that students are facing right now. And while anti intellectualism has taken many forms, on college campuses in the last ten years, it makes the most sense to focus on student advocacy for a free Palestine and student groups pushing

for university divestment from Israel. This mission expanded beyond Palestine for many groups in the last year and a half, and lists of demands put forward by students establishing encampments to both protest and push back on their university. Empowering other settler states has been critical. These groups also have sought to protect the student and staff's rights of any university to protest instead of This is.

Zionist Jewish students and groups. And you don't need me to tell you that this profiling, censorship, and state violence has only escalated since Trump re entered the White House. But I digress. November twenty seventh, twenty twenty four, It's been less than a month since Donald Trump was re elected by America, this time without having to cheat his way into it and promising any number of horrifying policies

before re entering office. As Joe Biden does his last few laps in the Olympic sized pool of lukewarm ice cream that he floated around in instead of doing anything. It's one day before Hailey Welch aka the Hawk Tua Girl will release what she does not yet know is the final episode of Talk To for over six months before the crypto scam she's become the face of is busted. And it's a week before internet boyfriend Luigi Mangioni will assassinate a healthcare executive after being the poat producer of

this very show. Robert Evans radicalized by pain.

before the Internet. She was not particularly logged in and didn't really want to be like a lot of PhD students. She's a book forward person, but she lives in a society and did have social media accounts that she used sparingly in order to keep in touch with friends and family, as well as to make professional connections in a field of study that was and is extremely specific and so. On November twenty seventh, she posted to her Twitter slash x account with the selfie of Ali and her now

professionally bound thesis. She wears a simple red sweater and smiles, captioning the photo.

the platform before this were months apart. One was a photo of the Cambridge campus that.

announcement out to a larger audience. The only thing that made it possible for it to go viral anyways, was the fact that her account was a public one. Think of the conventional ways that we would try to court attention on social media if we wanted a post to get outside of our followers. It's generally a game of tagging right, add a hashtag tag the account of a larger institution or another account in the hopes that they will either engage with or repost it, And nothing like

that is happening here. What's happening is the twenty twenty four Twitter slash x algorithm, one that, as we discussed in our Hailey Welch Talk TUA series, is conditioned to boost emotionally driven content and most importantly, elevate the replies of paying subscribers. So the blue check freaks I was referring to, and through this pay to play increasingly fascistic platform that longtime users had been departing in the millions

and continue to now. Doctor Allie's inoffensive, celebratory post got sucked into this algorithm and pulled in some of the gnarliest Blue check comments ever generated by either a dumb man or AI trained on a dumb man. It's hard to tell. Sometimes. Buckle in.

degree that does nothing for the furtherance of society. Women would rather spend years pursuing stupid degrees that won't fulfill them over a family that actually will enjoy the debt, since nothing you learned or produced will ever be of any benefit to society. Adorable, but what can you do with this? pH dick?

of her. And while it took a few days, the story does go viral in a way that crosses into the mainstream press, which, as we've discussed, is pretty rare these days, and doctor Allie is, for the most part game to engage with the story going viral, and the benefit here, it seems, for her, is that she knows that what she does is niche, and she rightfully isn't taking the horrific bad faith criticism around it very seriously. Some headlines from the days that.

this simple. Instead, her paper is a look at how smell has been presented in literature over time in order to make a definitive statement about a marginalized person, and what that definitive statement says about the author, the place, and the social mores of the time in which it was written. You can hate the premise if you want, but taking a few seconds makes it clear that the point of her paper is to build out a cultural history of smell, the one sense that is still widely

under estimated and misunderstood. There is value to this, so why can people not take it seriously? Here I want to again bring up the twenty twenty two case of the drinking coffee in the garden with my husband post because their similarities and differences I think are pretty instructive here as a refresher. If you haven't listened to this episode, and you should. User Daisy Miller posted this simple statement to her ten thousand or so followers on Twitter. My husband and I wake.

discourse was backlash to Daisy herself. The second round of discourse was backlash to the backlash, where thousands came to Daisy's defense saying that this was an innocuous statement. And finally there was some light coverage from places like BuzzFeed and Page six before the whole story kind of petered out. Daisy did interact with the story at first, but only

for a short amount of time. She stayed positive, but ultimately and rightfully seemed overwhelmed by the attention and migrated platforms.

This was in the fall of twenty twenty two, about six months after Elon Musk bought Twitter as a joke and then tried to save face by turning it into a hub for fascist thought, and so a big similarity between Daisy's story and doctor Ali Luke's story is that these were posts made by women for a very specific audience, but the criticism that they received was a result of the algorithm pushing these posts into the feed of people who would probably hate it, ostensibly because these people would

engage with it. And to be clear, this is requiring some guesswork on my part because of all the secret policy that Twitter has managed to accidentally leak over the last couple of years, big scary algorithm changes do not tend to be one of them. But on its face, both of these examples are Elon era Twitter harassment stories, where the machine has been calibrated to get women harassed over nothing through no fault of their own. But there

are a few differences between these stories. In doctor Alli's case, twenty twenty four gave the Internet and Twitter too full years to descend further into anti intellectualism, and in a more concrete sense, the replies that got the most boost in the algorithm were different from Daisy's experience, and that is because of a very cursed program that was rolled out in the month after Coffee in the Garden with my husband in November twenty twenty two x premium formerly

known as Twitter Blue, where in previous years a blue check beside your Twitter user name was free and the result of being verified as a prominent person or brand on the app. This new program allowed for as low as eight bucks a month to receive this blue check as a veneer of distinction, as well as ensuring that if you replied to a tweet that your reply would be boosted in the algorithm to show up before most

unpaid users, regardless of how popular your reply was. There was a lot of contray over this program and continues to be, but most of the Blue checks that I followed back in the day on Twitter really just responded by ceasing to use their account or just deleting it altogether.

And in this first round of discourse, attacks on doctor Ali Luke's mainly came from this type of account, many of which are speculated to be bots, and their responses were amplified in the way that they couldn't have been during Daisy Miller's moment of virality with Coffee in the Garden. But the second round of engagement in these cases are

the same. Once Ali's tweet had gotten enough engagement, there was an equally strong second round of discourse in support of her thesis on smell, with many accounts replying with encouragement and asking when her thesis would be available to read, which, if you're curious, is unfortunately available still nowhere at the

time of this writing. But that didn't stop doctor Ali from wanting people to un understand where she was coming from while replying to as many people as she could, which is no small task or a relatively offline person who was suddenly exposed to millions of accounts. Ali replied to the original, now wildly viral post with clarification on what her thesis was actually about.

species power structures. I focus largely on pros fiction from the modern contemporary periods so as to trace the legacy of olfactory prejudice in today and situate its contemporary relevance.

cornered the market on talking about it. As I hope I've established at this point, I think there is tremendous value in seeing how something as both universal and understudied as smell, something almost everybody deals with, has been represented in the arts as a way of framing how we've interpreted our relationship to it over a course of centuries. But this would not be an opinion shared in a

void of anti intellectualism. As the humanities continue to be de emphasized in the West, the idea that literary work could be anything but a pastime and not contain actual historical value or insight. Is not as commonly shared an

opinion as it once was. But another aspect that I find interesting about how doctor Alli in twenty twenty four and Daisy Miller in twenty twenty two respond to this absolute torrential downpour of hate in the comments is how they respond as individuals, because, unlike Daisy, doctor Ali engages with her haters with a relatively and I think incredibly even keel for weeks. Here's an example of her thoughtfully engaging with an absolute shode as long as said chode

was expressing a thought that wasn't just outright misogyny. The commenter writes.

didn't or couldn't affect her. It was a deeply stressful factor, and I think the most extreme example she's shared is this tweet about the fact that she needed to report a threat to the authorities on December one, twenty twenty four. Alie writes, to be.

response to a hot take. Virtually all of the harassment doctor Ali was receiving was a result of violent projection on a platform where hate speech and threats are increasingly tolerated and inflammatory statements are boosted and even monetized. And all doctor Ali had done is commit the cardinal contemporary sin of being too woke. It's truly disgusting, and this is how a person who kept her personal life offline and posted almost never at all suddenly became an optimal

target for gendered and homophobic harassment. To her attackers, Ali represented the exact kind of highly educated feminist intellectual that the right has delighted in threatening on social media and in real life at increasing rates for the last decade and then some. And while doctor Ali doesn't draw much attention to this in subsequent press appearances, this is just as good as time as any to discuss the state of online harassment, particularly because this story is such a

recent one. Because in one sense, yes, the old chestnuts of online misogyny ring true here right. Being a woman online, being non white online, being trans online can and often is a fucking nightmare, particularly when you get pushed into the wrong side of the algorithm. But if you've also had the creeping feeling that this type of harassment has been getting worse in the last few years, you're far

from alone, and you're probably right. In recent years, there has been a number of studies on how safe people and marginalized people specifically felt online after reports of online harassment had scaled up significantly. Sixteen percent of respondents told the Pew Research Center that they had been harassed online in twenty fourteen, a number that increased to twenty eight percent by twenty twenty one. These numbers then increased dramatically

when narrowed to just speaking to women. The Worldwide Web Foundation's twenty twenty study said that over half of women and girl respondents had been harassed online before, and that eighty seven percent felt the problem was getting worse. This was before Elon bought Twitter, and this also scales up with a number of suicides among marginalized young people as a result of cyberbullying in that same timeframe. So why

is it getting worse? To say that the world is full of idiot bigots is true, but too simple to be a full answer. It doesn't explain why, as time goes on we see people online being attacked over less and less. To say that that's because of Trump's reelection would also be to miss the forest for the trees, because yes, his being in power does endorse and even

encourage more subjugation that is empowered by the government. But all of these numbers I just cited of increasing anxiety around online harassment were conducted during the Biden administration, as is the example of coffee in the garden with my husband. Okay,

so maybe it's not entirely that. Like so many things about the contemporary Internet, I think a lot of this can be traced to algorithm driven timelines instead of the linear, personally curated ones that first made apps like Twitter, Facebook, and on and on so successful today, where the famously

algorithm driven TikTok remains king among young users. This is true almost nowhere, meaning that as in both doctor Ali and Daisy's cases, their harassment was the result of an algorithm recognizing that pushing their post out to users who either genuinely hated women academia or both, or were willing to perform hating women and academia for cloud and personal

profit and pushing their content there. It's a kind of harassment that wouldn't have been possible ten years ago, and one that makes the Internet a far less safe place for everyone while making it more profitable for very few. Are we sensing a familiar pattern here? No, Okay, my soapbox just collapsed beneath my feet, but be serious. What's happened here is that places like Twitter slash x have put a new, easy to use style of harassment in

front of its worst users and literally monetized it. Doctor Ali Luke's getting messages like the one we read is completely horrifying and I hate how normal they've come to feel. And sure, reporting it is one of the very few options victims of this type of harassment have at their disposal, But like anything regarding threats of violence against women, police are his store and expectedly dog shit at dealing with them. Doctor Alli did discuss how this harassment affected her in

a couple interviews. Again, in a moment that we come to see for all main characters, she had to decide whether she was going to let this story go away on its own by not engaging with it, or potentially extend the moment by participating, and she decides to go for it, but in a very specific way that still prioritizes her privacy. I think it's pretty cool. This is why it's nice to add in sounds on the podcast.

I can tell you what's funny, and if you disagree, you hate women, she recently told Rolling Stone.

suddenly captive and supportive audience. Because after the rounds of Twitter discourse died down and the blue checks moved on to harass the next person, Doctor Allie began posting regularly about smell in an attempt to answer good faith questions and share more about what she was actually studying, and her audience, presumably as under educated about smell as I was and still am, stayed and were really interested in what she had to say. Here are a few posts she made in the months that followed.

of my thesis. Yes, in order to understand how authors useful factory messaging, we must recognize that smells linked to different identity characteristics, for example, class race, in different ways, and that sometimes these characteristics overlap. Treating complexity.

it's framed in contemporary media. By her account, the harassment died down as soon as the blue checks moved on to their next victim, very likely when the algorithm stopped piping out her content to people who hated it once it started to produce diminishing returns. And while absolutely nothing justifies the fear of receiving the kinds of threats that she did, Doctor Allie has decided to make lemonade. She's got literary agents and with any luck, a book on

the way soon. Fingers crossed, and when we come back, doctor Ali Lukes tells us what the whole experience was like from her side of the keyboard. Welcome back to sixteenth minute. I got pretty burnt out in the middle of reading that book about Smell, and so I took a break to watch Scream six and this actor named Dermott mulroney is in it. And I know that he's a person who has been famous for a while, but I'm never not completely taken aback when I see the

name Dermott mulroney. Like, your name is Dermott mulroney, I'm Dermott. No it's not. And here is my interview with the wonderful doctor Ali Lukex.

I found was this article called What's This Smell? By Hands Rendersbacker, and I thought that it was perhaps the most unique and interesting piece of criticism I'd ever read, And I think that was really what got me hooked. And it was kind of just freely available on academia dot edu, so that was great. I'm really a champion for free public access to resources. You know. I do feel that it's a shame that my thesis is embargoed, but it's also a necessity for now just to like

protect my intellectual property until I can publish it. I'm really invested in making sure that academic work can be translated for public audiences and is available to public audiences. So I thought that it was really cool that he'd put it up on this public website for everyone to be able to access.

I was never really interested. I was just I would rather read books, Like I grew up with audio books. On the daily. You could find me painting or drawing whilst listening to an audiobook. That is how I wanted to spend my time, and it's how I still want to spend my time. Nothing has changed.

two polls. I had already developed this base of knowledge and smell studies over kind of over years of studying it during my undergrad and my masters, but I was studying it in usually historical contexts, so I kind of purposefully left a gap the PhD where I would finally get to talk about modern and contemporary literature. It turned out that like hardly anyone was doing that work. Certainly no one was doing it in the way that I wanted to do it. So I really had free reign,

which was great, so exciting. Honestly, welcome to my world. It has been the most amazing seven or eight years of studying this thing. Almost everything I say is a relatively new thing to people. It's so hard to happen upon that kind of thing in academia. So the process of writing the thesis, I knew the structure going into it.

I knew that I wanted to structure it around identity categories because I had noticed in my reading Smell related to individual identity categories in quite distinct ways, but that all of those identity categories were related, and that there was this kind of collapsing and interesting overlaying of different social meanings that Smell could take on in relation to

different identity categories. I wanted to write a thesis that really took each identity category seriously, but in which each of the chapters spoke to one another, and then I just read voraciously.

It's the same story on Twitter. And the reason that I posted the photograph in the first place was because I kind of thought again, because I didn't realize that the platform had changed and people had left, mostly that my smell studies people and my literary studies people were still there and they might want to know that I'm done because they might have like potential post top projects that I could join. I did it for a reason.

I didn't expect it to be met by an audience outside of the three hundred or so people that I followed on Twitter.

become extremely hostile, and those comments started gaining traction. So it wasn't just that it was the odd strange comment that you could kind of report and ignore these comments whilst it was bouncing around that hostile part of the platform. Those comments started shooting up to the top of the

kind of comments. They were gaining the most likes and completely They weren't by any means outweighing all of the positive congratulatory comments, but they were the first that anyone would see when they looked at the post because they had the most.

on that platform. I didn't realize that you could check quote tweets, so I would stumble upon quote tweets of that original tweet with like millions and millions of impressions. Even as I thought I was doing quite a good job of keeping up with the replies, I was still missing them thousands and thousands of quote tweets. It wasn't that I was losing. It wasn't like it was keeping me up at night. I think mentally, I was really unscathed by this. I'm quite a difficult person to phase.

Partly that's because the critiques were so ludicrous in so many instances, and there was some valid skepticism. Don't get me wrong. I don't expect everyone to read the title The Politics of Smell and think, oh, yeah, of course, that's a really useful thing that we need in society. But I felt confident that provided I was given the time and space, I would be able to win over at least some of the people who were skeptical about

the value of the thesis. I didn't worry about critiques of my work because you know, ultimately they only had the title of my thesis and the abstract, which was written and intended for an academic audience, and so I understood why some people were saying that it was kind of obfuscating or it was inaccessible. I think that's a fair critique of an academic abstract, almost any academic abstract, and it's not the way that I would convey my ideas to a general public. So nobody really had anything

else to say about the work. The work, you know what. They were making assumptions about the work, but those assumptions were false.

very clearly willfully misinterpreting what you're saying. You replied to a lot of people thoughtfully and patiently. What motivated you to do that?

the world of public discourse. Because I do think there's something to be said about the insulation of academia, the way that you know, we all talk to each other and we're all kind of interested in our in our own niche little aspects of whatever it is that we're

working on. It is easy, I think, in academia to feel slightly separated from the real world in a way that is I think distinct from the criticism of academia that we're all kind of in ivory towers, and that we don't have any understanding of the real world in terms of privilege. I think it's not sensible to make assumptions about people online whether they're in academia or not. We still have a long ways to go in terms of making academia equitable, in making sure that you know

everybody has access to those resources. But it's not possible to tell based on a picture of someone right what their background is. My friends have told me since the dawn of time that I'm quite a naive person and that I'm probably too earnest for my own good, and I think I probably bring that to my social media presence because I don't know how else to be. I've experienced people coming in with hostility or writing something that is clearly quite combative, and provided you don't kind of

stoop to their level, sometimes people will turn around. I think the problem is online we forget that people are real people. I think when I engage with people online, I assume that everyone that I'm talking to is a real person, probably even when they're a bot. The post went viral towards the end of term, so I think I had a out a week of teaching left before the end of term. Most of my students mentioned it. But honestly, that generation, they're implacable. They are so difficult

to phase. They were just like, oh, I saw that you were on BBC News. What's that about? Yeah, And a couple of them, a couple of them were, you know, really worried. And one of them brought me a plant, which is over there on my desk. Oh, that's so sweet, and it was yeah. I mean, I love my students. I think they're wonderful, but they they truly do not care. They don't care at all about my personal life or what I'm doing outside of teaching them. And that's great. I love that.

quite right wing. Their assessment of the situation was remarkably charitable. That they've done a couple of articles now and they've they've been really kind of glowing, and I'm still unsure as to how I've pulled that off.

I also, you know, didn't want to let it kind of overshadow the things that I really want to invest my time in, which is teaching my students and writing. I think I've found a nice balance. I don't spend very much time on there at all.

didn't know that it was. I think I truly, I mean, I guess intellectually, I knew that it was possible for people to be so hostile and so combative towards something they don't understand. But it's a different thing knowing something

is possible and experiencing it yourself. I do think, though, that perhaps some of that has to do with the fact that almost all of us have a sense of smell, and almost all of us have a whole lifetime of experiences to draw on when we're talking about smell, and so we all kind of feel like we're experts in our own experience of smell. I can see why people feel maybe concerned about the idea that their sense of smell could be doing something that they're not aware of.

I think I think that's maybe a little it's suspicious, and I can see why people would be worried about it. I don't I don't really see why people would react with quite the amount of vitriol that they did. But then again, I'm I'm not them, and I'm kind of happy with I'm certainly happy with that. I'm happy to accept that a whole variety of people exist in the world, and that has nothing to do with me or my work.

US in comparison to the UK. But it's estimated that something like twenty seven million people still have long lasting damage to their sense of smell and their sense of taste because the sense of smell is up to ninety five percent. Well, it's flavor taste is separable. I'm going to get into a whole thing. It doesn't even matter.

our well being. Actually, so that's something that I hope

is cooking. The other reason that studying smell disorders is really important is because evidence, recent evidence starting in about twenty twenty three, suggests that we're all losing our sense of smell, that the effects of pollution are causing us all to have a diminished sense of smell, and that is disproportionately affecting people from low income backgrounds and racialized communities, because those are the kinds of people who typically are

situated around heavily polluting industrial where houses because they're cheap. Those houses are cheap, and that is a serious problem. It's a serious problem that really is own we're only just starting to talk about in the smell studies community, let alone in the kind of broader public discourse.

to keep seeing more and more interesting work about smell. So, you know, I would love to keep talking about smell,

commentating on smell, bringing that work to public audiences. But I also think that there's work to be done in just advocating for and championing the value of the humanities and trying to get away from this idea that the humanities and the sciences are in competition, because I think my work certainly suggests that literally studies specifically, it's kind of open to reinvention in the process of new interdisciplinary encounters that I would I would love to be a

small part of the story of trying to make the humanities cool again. I'm so grateful for my audience of people who are curious and interested in learning about things that they might not have encountered before. I don't think that people actually think the humanities are uncool. I mean some people do. I don't think that it's this kind of like received understanding of the value of the humanities. I don't think it's that pervasive in the US. I'm sure it's this. It's it's the same as in the UK.

People are increasingly worried that they're not going to be able to get a job that will give them a life that is livable, and there's this kind of fear mongering surround surrounding the humanities that suggests that if people pursue degrees in the humanities, then that's not going to offer them employability at the end of it. And I

actually think that that's statistically not true. I've looked at some of the reports about employability and it turns out that certainly in many sectors, English is more employable than something like physics. The way that we talk about things online really really matters. It can seriously obscure the reality

of a situation. We kind of need people who are willing to go to bat for the humanities when they're in this kind of pressure cooker situation of being defunded and push to one side people who just simply don't understand the value of them control the conversation, and that in some ways does more damage than anything else because

it puts people off. It puts people off even trying right right, You have teenagers thinking, oh, well, I absolutely love literature, but I don't think I can go and study it because you know, what's the point at the end of it, How is it going to get me a job? And I I like, realistically, I don't think that's a problem any more than it is for certain

other disciplines that are outside of the humanities. And it's just stopping people from engaging in what they really would love to do, and that's problematic.

but it makes a lot of sense. And as with so many marginalized people doing important, undervalued work, it is so frustrating that academics like Ali Luke's are always the first to absorb this absurd amount of vitriol from the worst faith people on the planet with Internet connections, and so, dear listener, I am hanging in for a book from Ali. I have a good feeling because whether those chodes on X believe it or not work like hers can really

make a huge difference. Doctor Ali Lukes, Your sixteenth minute ends now.