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

After eight long years of research, Dr. Ally Louks posted to Twitter about completing her Ph. D : "Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose." The Elon-fueled right-wing internet freaked out. In an exclusive interview, Jamie speaks with Dr. Louks about the experience of reclaiming the narrative around a nasty online backlash to better educate anti-intellectuals on the sense we ignore the most.

 Follow Dr. Ally here: https://x.com/DrAllyLouks

Read Dr. Ally's original thread here: https://x.com/DrAllyLouks/status/1861872149373297078?lang=en

vote for "we the unhoused" for a webby before april 17th!: https://vote.webbyawards.com/PublicVoting#/2025/podcasts/shows/public-service-activism

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Media. Hello sixteenth minute listeners. It's Jamie just saying
really quick at the top that a show that is
my honor to produce on the iHeartRadio network. We the
Unhoused has been nominated for a webby and we need
your help. If you haven't listened to the show before,

(00:22):
first of all, I highly recommend you do. But it
is a show that began in twenty nineteen. It's created, hosted,
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

(00:44):
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

(01:07):
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

(01:29):
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

(01:49):
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.

(02:12):
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

(02:36):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:56):
It has been a long cultural belief that in order
to be a reasonable or rational person, you could not
be dominated by a sense of smell. Smell was linked
to earthly animalistic tendencies, and.

Speaker 1 (03:10):
Since twenty seventeen it has been debunked that we can
discern a trillion smells. But this is just another piece
of evidence that this area of humankind is wildly under explored.
There have since been numerous attempts to identify with more
specificity where exactly humans stand in the mammal smelling hierarchy.

(03:32):
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

(03:54):
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,

(04:16):
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

(04:38):
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

(05:01):
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

(05:23):
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

(05:47):
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,

(06:08):
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

(06:31):
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

(06:51):
a few distinct ways by encouraging disgust or even inventing
smells around menstruation and a specifically.

Speaker 2 (07:01):
I read somewhere that their periods attract bears. The bears
can smell the menstruation.

Speaker 3 (07:08):
Hear the head bears.

Speaker 2 (07:10):
Now you put in the whole station in.

Speaker 1 (07:11):
Jeopardy basically in a heteronormative structure. Give me a horn
for the term heteronormative women that men were trained to
view as disgusting when it came to fucking or making
them wives. You know the deal. But interestingly, even the
quality is that men are conditioned to find desirable were
also sometimes dismissed based on their smell. Throughout time, there

(07:34):
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

(07:57):
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.

Speaker 3 (08:07):
Now.

Speaker 1 (08:07):
Part of the reason we know so little about smell
at the Earth's advanced age, the author argues, is because
there is very little encouragement under capitalism to learn more
about smell. That is, there's not much money in this
line of study unless you're trying to identify what is
going to sell deodorant and candles, and so to this day,

(08:29):
getting funding for anything outside of what smells can sell
can be a real challenge in the modern age. Muchumbled
argues that our pushing smell aside as a powerful sense
is very intentional.

Speaker 2 (08:43):
He writes, our deodorized world now offers a kind of
antidote to existential anguish as olfactory silence has developed in
parallel with the silence surrounding disease and death dating from
around the same time.

Speaker 1 (08:59):
But there's no such thing as a deodorized society, whether
we're afraid of death or not. So much of the
way people have interpreted smell over time has been subjective,
depending on the way that they were encouraged to see, interpret,
and experience shitting and death mainly, among other things. And
the further back you go from modern medicine and plumbing,

(09:21):
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.

Speaker 2 (09:33):
Scent of a woman.

Speaker 1 (09:35):
Should make you feel one way or another, it's had
varying results while remaining an intense fixation and subject of discussion.
Bliny the Elder, Yes, we're going back that far. Bliney
the Elder said that the scent of menstruating people just
their existence caused horses to have abortions. Really think about that, then. Paradoxically,

(10:00):
sixteenth century writer Marguerite de Navarre implied that infertile women's
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

(10:21):
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.

Speaker 2 (10:43):
Since women abound with excrement and emit ill smells because
of their periods, they make all things worse and spoil
than natural forces and innate qualities.

Speaker 1 (10:58):
But don't worry, if you go through menopause, you still
smell fucking gross, and also you're old. From Erasmus is
fifteen eleven work in praise of folly.

Speaker 2 (11:09):
Better sports tale is to see those decrepit old women.
That old age seems long since to have cut off
from the number of the living, those strolling corpses, those
stinking carcasses, which everywhere exhale a sepulchral odor, and yet
who cry at every moment. Nothing is sweeter than life.

Speaker 1 (11:32):
So, if you're keeping score, if you menstruated, you stank
of the devil, but once you didn't menstruate, you stank
of a corpse. And this smell was directly connected in
both cases with Satan himself, whose period is gnarly, I'm sure.
And while there are countless examples that draw smell as

(11:53):
an indicator of character of where one should stand in
an enforced hierarchy, there's been shockingly little recognition that that's
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

(12:15):
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,

(12:38):
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

(13:00):
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

(13:21):
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,

(14:33):
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

(14:57):
decade's worth of higher education studying an underappreciated but critically
necessary intersection of science and the humanities. How dare she?

Speaker 4 (15:07):
What?

Speaker 1 (15:07):
An asshole? In all seriousness, I was very lucky to
get to speak with doctor Ali Lukes. She is wonderful
and this story in particular, I think has a lot
to say about where our relationship with the internet is
right now. So let's get into it. Come with me
if you dare to. November twenty twenty four. Very recent story,

(15:33):
to be sure, but in a world this completely dystopian,
it is worth putting ourselves in a moment online down
to the finest detail, because if you haven't noticed, it's
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

(15:57):
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

(16:23):
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.

Speaker 4 (16:44):
The moment Tuff's University graduate student Rumesa Oster was arrested
and taken into federal custody. Doorbell camera footage obtained by
NBC News shows two plain clothes officers approaching the thirty
year old in Somerville outside of Boston. Os Turk at
first appears to back away before more agents approach.

Speaker 1 (17:04):
This also comes with, to no one's surprise, a tremendous
amount of xenophobia and racism by the students who are
working within these spaces. There are countless examples of student
protesters being profiled by race, particularly Palestinian, other Middle Eastern
or black students. These students were and are characterized not

(17:28):
as anti genocide but as anti Semitic, even with the
large portion of student organizers being composed of young anti
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

(17:52):
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.

(18:14):
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

(18:38):
this very show. Robert Evans radicalized by pain.

Speaker 5 (18:42):
This past week, legacy media and Lonely Cat owning true
crime podcast fans were obsessed with the mysterious man Dan
Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare, even though there
was only just fuzzy surveillance footage, thirsty men and women
calling him things like socialist Daddy, putting him on a
pedalstal for literally a stranger in the back and then
running away from the authorities.

Speaker 1 (18:59):
You tell, Ben. And even though it sounds counterintuitive that
with all this going on, with the rights of immigrants,
of trans people, of anyone who could need an abortion
on the chopping block again or still, the Internet found
some time and energy to bully a doctoral student for
finishing her thesis because woke while Ali Lukes, and that's

(19:24):
doctor Ali Lukes to you, was about twenty seven when
all of this happened, and could barely remember a time
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

(19:46):
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,

(20:11):
captioning the photo.

Speaker 3 (20:13):
Thrilled to say, I passed my VIVA with no corrections
and an officially pH done.

Speaker 1 (20:17):
Grad student LINGO don't worry about it, but what gets
people stirred up and through some opaque, algorithmically driven nightmare
pushed into the feeds of hundreds of thousands of blue
check AI Cryptonihilist Freaks is the title of the paper
she's written, an embossed gold text on the red leather cover.

(20:38):
Doctor Ali Lukes wrote her Cambridge University thesis on.

Speaker 3 (20:42):
O factory ethics, the politics of smell and modern and
contemporary prose.

Speaker 1 (20:49):
Smell and not just smell, but how smell has been
characterized in literature an obscure topic. Sure, social function not
immediately obvious. Fair Even Ali gets why the function of
her thesis paper might not be immediately obvious to those

(21:09):
out of the know, as she will explain in our interview.
But keep in mind she's not trying to get this
out to a general public. She only has a couple
hundred X followers at this time. Her last posts on
the platform before this were months apart. One was a
photo of the Cambridge campus that.

Speaker 3 (21:29):
Read extremely fortunate that I get to teach in a
place as beautiful as this.

Speaker 1 (21:34):
And the other was a photo of her on campus
from June of twenty twenty four, reading.

Speaker 3 (21:39):
I submitted my PhD thesis today.

Speaker 1 (21:42):
This was an account for her peers, professional and personal
people who would most likely understand the function of her
thesis paper because they were academics too. I'm reminded quite
a bit of the Coffee in the Garden with my
husband Saga when it comes to this story. It was
actually one of the first episode topics that we covered

(22:03):
on sixteenth Minute all the way last spring, in that
doctor Alli was definitely not trying to get this pieceis
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

(22:25):
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

(22:49):
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

(23:11):
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

(23:33):
to tell. Sometimes. Buckle in.

Speaker 2 (23:37):
For those wondering her PhD thesis per abstract is basically
on why it's racist and or classicist to not like
it when people exhibit body odors consistent with poor hygiene.
You would have spent your years better by getting married
and having children. Oh look, another woman getting a useless

(23:59):
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?

Speaker 1 (24:21):
Okay, well done, boys. While the algorithm is the original
offender for driving harassment towards doctor Allie, her post was
further boosted in the algorithm when influential blue check accounts
began to quote tweet the post with random misogynist criticisms
of her. And while it took a few days, the

(24:43):
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

(25:05):
taking the horrific bad faith criticism around it very seriously.
Some headlines from the days that.

Speaker 2 (25:12):
Followed why this Cambridge Grads PhD thesis on smelly people
is dividing the internet olfactory oppression.

Speaker 1 (25:20):
They attacked her PhD. Now this smell expert is making
x her classroom.

Speaker 2 (25:25):
In defense of writing a quirky thesis on the politics
of smell in modern literature.

Speaker 1 (25:30):
The tone of most of this coverage is nothing really surprising,
and by that I mean so tremendously half cooked that
it makes you want to rip your head off. Here
is something from the New York Post.

Speaker 2 (25:42):
The thesis states that olfactory discussed can result in a
person's rejection. Online critics needed smelling salts after reading what
they deemed to be woke sounding, academic gobbledygook.

Speaker 1 (25:55):
And while very little of this coverage is outright hostile,
who doctor Ali Luke's very few I was able to
find seem to take the time to understand what her
thesis was actually about, which we will get into the
tone of So much of this criticism framed the topic
as Ali applying a system of ethics to how marginalized

(26:18):
people smell. But if you look at her abstract, which
she shares, she makes it clear that it is not
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,

(26:42):
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

(27:05):
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

(27:28):
to her ten thousand or so followers on Twitter. My
husband and I wake.

Speaker 3 (27:32):
Up every morning and bring our coffee out to our
garden and sit and talk for hours every morning and
never get sold, and we never run out of things
to talk to. Love him so much.

Speaker 1 (27:41):
And as we unpacked in that episode, she got completely
demolished in the replies. With a few rounds of discourse
taking place, the tweet very quickly escaped its relatively small
intended audience of twenty something cottage core fans and made
its way into the uneneral cesspool, the most popular critique

(28:02):
at the time being that Daisy was bragging or being
insensitive to class by posting this. The first round of
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

(28:23):
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.

(28:45):
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,

(29:07):
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

(29:27):
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

(29:51):
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

(30:12):
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

(30:35):
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

(30:59):
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

(31:20):
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

(31:43):
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,

(32:06):
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.

Speaker 3 (32:22):
She writes, to be clear, this apptect was written for
experts within my discipline and field. It was not written
for a lay audience, and this is not how I
would communicate my ideas to the average person. Since there's
some confusion about the nature of my research, here is
the abstract from my PhD thesis, which I hope provide
more contexts for anyone interested in learning about my work.

Speaker 1 (32:41):
She then posts, per abstract.

Speaker 3 (32:43):
This thesis studies how literature registers the importance of olfactory discourse,
the language of smell and the olfactory imagination it creates
and structuring our social world. The broad aim of this
thesis is to offer an intersectional and wide ranging study
of olfactory oppression by establishing the underlying logistics that facilitate
Smell's application and creating subverting gender, class, sexual, racial, and
species power structures. I focus largely on pros fiction from

(33:06):
the modern contemporary periods so as to trace the legacy
of olfactory prejudice in today and situate its contemporary relevance.

Speaker 1 (33:12):
It goes on from there. I've linked it in the description,
and to be fair, this kind of paper is extremely
my shit, and I'm so glad that doctor ally has
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

(33:35):
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

(33:55):
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

(34:15):
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

(34:39):
engaging with an absolute shode as long as said chode
was expressing a thought that wasn't just outright misogyny. The
commenter writes.

Speaker 2 (34:50):
We need a new prefix for people with academic PhDs.
Doctor should mean something.

Speaker 3 (34:56):
Doctor Ali replies, you know what, I don't disagree with this.
I certainly won't be putting up my hand if someone
asks is there a doctor in here on a plane.

Speaker 1 (35:05):
The amount of times that doctor Alli Luke's shows genuine
patients with clearly bad faith commenters like this blew my
mind and made me so glad that she's a teacher,
because that kind of superhuman patience does not come easily
and she clearly had some practice with it, but that
doesn't mean that these bad faith comments and even threats

(35:28):
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.

Speaker 3 (35:46):
Clear, this is where I draw the line. This is
abhorred and illegal, and no one should ever have to
deal with this.

Speaker 1 (35:51):
Attached is a screenshot of an email she received on
her academic email earlier that day, which reads and trigger warning.

Speaker 2 (36:01):
You are the dumbest fucking bitch I have ever seen
on the Internet and the perfect example of literally everything
wrong with modern society. Imagine thinking you deserve taxpayer money
for writing up that useless piece of shit thesis nobody
will ever read vegan, feminist, and queer. Your dues to

(36:26):
society are many, and me and the boys will rape
them out of you.

Speaker 1 (36:31):
When we read this. In our script meeting for this episode,
our producer ian said that this was one of the
worst screeds he'd heard directed to anyone online. Ever, I
don't think you need me to remind you that this
was in response to an unpublished paper about smell in books.
There is no world where this is a rational response

(36:53):
to anything, but it's egregious here. This was not in
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

(37:15):
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

(37:40):
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

(38:02):
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

(38:24):
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

(38:46):
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

(39:06):
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

(39:30):
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,

(39:52):
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,

(40:13):
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

(40:35):
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

(40:59):
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

(41:23):
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.

(41:48):
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

(42:09):
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

(42:34):
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.

Speaker 3 (42:44):
I didn't know that this was going to get out
of hand until probably forty eight hours in, when I
started to see a couple of quite vicious comments. I thought,
oh no, it's moving over to the wrong side of
the platform, and so it did.

Speaker 1 (42:55):
So in the front facing media sense sense, doctor Allie
sticks to her guns, never apologizing to any of the
assholes who came after her, while still not sharing much
about herself, as is her right. And this approach, she
seems to quickly figure out, is a chance to make

(43:16):
a very niche subject that she studies accessible to a
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

(43:36):
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.

Speaker 3 (43:54):
I just know I'm going to be the talk of
the English faculty this week. Hi all, I couldn't be
more delighted that so many people pople have showed enthusiasm
towards my work, and I'd love to share more with
you as soon as I'm able, But right now my
first priority is my students. But still term time here,
and they deserve my time and attention in the context
of my thesis. Yes, in order to understand how authors
useful factory messaging, we must recognize that smells linked to

(44:16):
different identity characteristics, for example, class race, in different ways,
and that sometimes these characteristics overlap. Treating complexity.

Speaker 1 (44:24):
She began to do and is still doing, maybe the
most subversive thing you could do on Twitter right now,
something fucking useful, and it's worked. As of this writing,
her online audience has grown to over two hundred thousand
followers on Twitter, where she still bravely posts, ordinarily in

(44:46):
response to stories people send her regarding Smell and how
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

(45:11):
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

(45:49):
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.

(46:14):
No it's not. And here is my interview with the
wonderful doctor Ali Lukex.

Speaker 6 (46:20):
I'm doctor Ali Lukex. I'm currently a supervisor in English
Literature at the University of Cambridge and I work on smell.

Speaker 1 (46:27):
I've learned so much from you, but at what cost?
And that's what we're here to discuss today. Were you
always into olfactory studies? How did you get there?

Speaker 6 (46:37):
I was not always into ol factory studies. I arrived
at olfactory studies during my undergrad degree. I did my
undergraduate degree at the University of Exeter, which was fantastic.
It gave me all of the things that I needed
to get going.

Speaker 1 (46:53):
What were you studying at English Literature?

Speaker 6 (46:55):
So I did English literature undergrad English Issue in Modern
Culture at UCL for my master's degree, and everyone called
us the Issues students, which I felt was not very complementary.
My work even at Exeter was relatively into disciplinary in
that I was kind of given free reign to draw

(47:17):
on philosophy and sociology.

Speaker 1 (47:19):
In my work.

Speaker 6 (47:20):
But my master's degree was really my kind of first
forra and cultural studies. By the time I was in
my second year of undergrad, I already had become infatuated
with smell studies, although I didn't even really know that
it was called smell studies back then.

Speaker 1 (47:35):
I just knew that.

Speaker 6 (47:37):
I had noticed this really interesting thing about literature, which
was that in so many canonical texts, the texts that
were just set on our reading lists, smell was a
really fundamental part of how the authors were characterizing the
figures in their books, both in positive and negative ways,

(47:59):
that smell was used as a kind of political agent
in those books.

Speaker 1 (48:03):
You know better than anyone, I feel like, probably the
least examined sense, or at least considered sense, it's always
the one that I say I would give up.

Speaker 6 (48:12):
And you're not alone. I very often, I very often
do this thing with my students where I asked them
to rank their senses according to their perceived value, and
smell is like almost universally ranked at the bottom and
sight at the top. And then we inevitably end up
talking about smell because I can't stop talking about it,

(48:33):
and then everyone else gets interested in it and they
start reevaluating their biases.

Speaker 1 (48:38):
Taste suddenly found dead in a ditch. I mean, and
so you, over the course of higher education, you become
drawn to this very particular area of study. What existed
around this area of study, I honestly have no idea.

Speaker 6 (48:53):
When I was an undergraduate, smell Studies really had not
cohered into a stable field of study. I was drawing
on simply what was out there and what I had
access to, which was not everything. As it turned out,
I only realized that I'd been missing out on some
texts online when I got to Cambridge and suddenly had

(49:15):
access to basically everything. The first Smell Studies academic article
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,

(49:37):
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

(50:00):
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.

Speaker 1 (50:16):
What is your relationship with the internet like growing up
and into college sort of alongside your journey towards smell studies.

Speaker 6 (50:24):
I have always been very bookish. Since I could read. Basically,
I have been bookish. So I spend a lot more
time reading than I do on the internet. Even now
that i'm you know that I've been spending so much
time on the internet, I still read more than I
look at my social media. I was born ninety seven,

(50:46):
so okay, I'm on the cusp of remembering a time
before we had, you know, an enormous computer in the house.
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

(51:06):
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.

Speaker 1 (51:12):
How long did it take to write this thesis? What
was the process of researching it because I really want
to hit on what exactly this thesis is about, especially
to emphasize how wildly, bizarrely out of context it's taken.

Speaker 6 (51:26):
Later for me, it took three and a half years.
That's pretty typical, I think for a British PhD, most
people take about four years. It's possible to get it
done in three, but not many people do it. So
I'm kind of smack bang in the middle of those
two polls. I had already developed this base of knowledge
and smell studies over kind of over years of studying

(51:48):
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

(52:11):
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

(52:35):
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

(52:58):
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

(53:21):
really took each identity category seriously, but in which each
of the chapters spoke to one another, and then I
just read voraciously.

Speaker 1 (53:31):
So you complete your thesis? When do you complete your thesis?

Speaker 6 (53:35):
I completed my thesis in June twenty twenty four. I
think some people feel very ambivalently towards their PhD thesis
and the process of writing a PhD. I am very
grateful that I never lost my enthusiasm for my subject
or for the study of literature. I feel just as

(53:58):
enthused as when I started, if not more actually, because
the more you learn about smell, the more fascinating it is.

Speaker 1 (54:08):
Honestly, you have this beautiful, like bound version of your
thesis and you log on to formerly Twitter dot com.
How after when were you posting on this platform? What
was your like standing relationship with this platform on the day.

Speaker 6 (54:26):
For a couple of years, I think a couple of
years preceding the incident, I think I posted once every
six months. I spent so little time on it that
I had completely forgotten about the Musk takeover. I had
no idea what it had become. It's never really been
part of my personality. I don't think to be on

(54:48):
social media very much, and I think Twitter is the same.
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

(55:10):
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.

Speaker 1 (55:29):
Which is normal, but you're not in a normal place.
So walk me through this day, this series of days,
what pace did things start taking off? And how are
you feeling as that's happening.

Speaker 6 (55:44):
So the post gained traction immediately, but initially it was
among lots of kind people who were just offering their
congratulations on my accomplishment. So that fact, even though I
was uncomfortable about the attention, felt fine, right. But then

(56:05):
after about forty eight hours, I would say, I started
to notice some odd replies coming in, and then it
was reposted by a couple of right wing accounts with
big followings, and at that point the comments started to

(56:25):
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

(56:49):
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.

Speaker 1 (57:05):
Likes, prior to if you could remember the massive amplification
through the right wing accounts, what were the weirder responses
you were getting and what were proportionally positive to negative
before these big accounts latched onto it.

Speaker 6 (57:20):
I do think that it was such a whirlwind that,
even though in general I have quite a good memory
from my own experiences, I would struggle the most outlandish
comments coming in, you know, the kind of the really
long ones where someone's basically written an essay. And there

(57:42):
was one where someone was like, your ancestors were fighting
mountain lions and you are disgracing them. I was like,
where do you Who.

Speaker 1 (57:57):
Do you think I am? And where do you think
I live?

Speaker 6 (58:00):
As British as it.

Speaker 1 (58:02):
Gets, Yeah, that is I found a pretty common anti
intellectual reply to almost anything. It's like your ancestors did
something that matters and I hate you, and it's like, well,
what are you doing? How did you manage that? And
how did it translate to your normal life?

Speaker 6 (58:22):
Yeah, it was pretty all consuming for the first week,
if not longer. The replies were coming in way faster
than I could read them, which was stressful because I
like to have the full picture, so I was not
sleeping in an attempt to keep up with the conversation.
I probably got about three hours of sleep every night

(58:45):
for about nine days, constantly refreshing the other thing is.
And this really reveals how kind of illiterate I am
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.

(59:09):
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

(59:35):
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

(59:57):
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

(01:00:20):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:00:39):
So we'll be right back with more from doctor Alli.
Welcome back to sixteenth Minute. I bring lost an AMBI

(01:01:01):
podcast Award in Chicago last night. But the good news
is that I lost to a great show. I've been
listening to it all today. It's called Inheriting from LAist
and I think you'll really like it. It's linked in
the description and if you still respect my loser ass
here's the rest of my interview with doctor Ali Lukes.

(01:01:23):
You engaged with people, even if they were, you know,
very clearly willfully misinterpreting what you're saying. You replied to
a lot of people thoughtfully and patiently. What motivated you
to do that?

Speaker 6 (01:01:38):
I think fundamentally, I have no interest in arguing with
people on the internet. It's not a good use of
my time. Did, however, always intend to share my work
with a public audience. I always wanted to write a
trade book. I always wanted to disseminate my ideas in
a way that would be accessible to people, and I

(01:02:01):
had been given an opportunity to do that in an
unconventional way. Sure, but it was nevertheless an opportunity to
reach people and to kind of cut my teeth in
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

(01:02:23):
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

(01:02:45):
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

(01:03:06):
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

(01:03:27):
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,

(01:03:49):
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.

(01:04:09):
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,

(01:04:31):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:04:45):
Were you happy with the way that your story was
being framed in the media? How were you wanting to engage?

Speaker 6 (01:04:52):
This was probably the most chaotic period of my entire life,
the sort of three or four days once the media
had caught wind of it and everybody wanted to have
an interview, everybody wanted to comment, and trying to sift
through like hundreds of emails every day. I was happy

(01:05:16):
with the way that the media decided to report on this.
The first British publication to report on it was the
Daily Mail. And the Daily Mail they're known for being
quite right wing. Their assessment of the situation was remarkably charitable.

(01:05:38):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:05:47):
Did you feel pressure to be more online after this happened?

Speaker 6 (01:05:51):
I did feel pressure, but I also resisted the pressure.
So I decided that I would only do it as
long as I was having fun and as long as
people were feeding back that they were learning something. I

(01:06:11):
didn't want it. I didn't want it to just become
like a running joke. I wanted it actually to be
at least to some degree educational, because I think that's important.
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.

(01:06:35):
I think I've found a nice balance. I don't spend
very much time on there at all.

Speaker 1 (01:06:40):
What would you like to do with this new audience,
I mean, what would you like to sort of do
moving forward? I am like I would love to read
a book about smell theory from you. Oh well, I'm.

Speaker 6 (01:06:55):
Very pleased to hear that this is what it's all
been leading up to for me, because although I really
enjoy explaining smell stuff to people on Twitter in a
limited amount of characters, it's quite good for me actually
to practice being really concise. I am a writer, and

(01:07:15):
I do think that my ideas are probably best conveyed
in the form of like long form prose. So I
think if people are interested in the ideas, then they're
going to love the trade book.

Speaker 1 (01:07:28):
But now that there's sort of massive unexpected thing has happened. Yeah,
what is your takeaway? Ben From having survived the main
character experience and been able to return to your normal life, I.

Speaker 6 (01:07:45):
Have not returned to my normal life.

Speaker 1 (01:07:47):
Okay, say more about that.

Speaker 6 (01:07:50):
I that my normal life has been and gone, but
not in a bad way. Not in a bad way,
I mean, in many ways, this experience hasn't changed me.
It hasn't changed my personality, It hasn't changed my perspective.
It hasn't changed my perspective on the work or on
what I want to do with it. It has slightly

(01:08:12):
changed my perspective on some people who are wild. I
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

(01:08:36):
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

(01:09:00):
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

(01:09:21):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:09:36):
What is next for this field of study? What would
you like to see happen moving forward?

Speaker 6 (01:09:41):
Oh, this is I mean, this is a personal bias
because this is what I want to do next. Please, yeah,
because I want to do it. That is That is
how I feel. I mean, I mean, I'm already in
the process of this. I'm developing a post doctoral project
that would study the effects of smell disorders. I think
this is like you know post well, we say post COVID,

(01:10:03):
but that is a really contentious thing, especially in the
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

(01:10:26):
to get into a whole thing. It doesn't even matter.

Speaker 1 (01:10:31):
Really, don't get her start it, don't give her startled.

Speaker 6 (01:10:37):
But there are globally so many people have been affected
by smell disorders, and they are dramatically understudied. But the
studies that we do have show that depression, anxiety, suicidality,
weight loss, all of these things come in the wake

(01:10:59):
of losing sense of smell. So I think a project
that studies the effects of smell disorders would really help
to completely re evaluate the way that we think about
smell and the way it contributes to our lives and
our well being. Actually, so that's something that I hope

(01:11:21):
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

(01:11:44):
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.

(01:12:06):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:12:17):
And I'm sure people have asked you this before. What
is your favorite smell? What is the best smell to you?

Speaker 6 (01:12:26):
My go to answer now because people have asked me
this and I've been.

Speaker 1 (01:12:30):
I don't have to imagine.

Speaker 6 (01:12:31):
Yeah, is fresh garden sage like garden sage when you
like tear up a leaf that smell is my favorite.

Speaker 1 (01:12:43):
Wow, you're literally out there touching grass, doing the thing
that everyone's telling each other to do in the internet.

Speaker 6 (01:12:50):
I am obsessed with smell. There's this It's on. It's
indubitable that I am obsessed with smell. I can't imagine
that obsession waning, actually, partly because there's so much work
to be done. Yeah, and it has been like notoriously
difficult to get funding to do work on smell because

(01:13:13):
it's not valued. And now that the tables are turning
slightly and we're seeing more interest in sensory studies broadly
in the academy, I do think that we're just going
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

(01:13:38):
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

(01:13:58):
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

(01:14:23):
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

(01:14:44):
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

(01:15:06):
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

(01:15:29):
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

(01:15:49):
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

(01:16:14):
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

(01:16:37):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:16:46):
Thank you so much for making time for this. I
really appreciate it.

Speaker 6 (01:16:50):
It's an absolute pleasure. Thank you for asking me.

Speaker 1 (01:16:53):
Thanks so much to doctor Ali Lukes, who you can
follow at the links in the description for when she
has time to share her brilliance with you. I am
so inspired by Ali's even headedness and commitment to her
line of study, in particular her care in noting that
a diminished sense of smell due to long COVID could

(01:17:16):
stand to hurt a lot of people down the line,
particularly those who live in frontline climate communities. I don't
know about you, but that had certainly not occurred to me,
but it makes a lot of sense. And as with
so many marginalized people doing important, undervalued work, it is

(01:17:36):
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.

(01:17:57):
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.

Speaker 7 (01:18:16):
Sixteenth Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and
iHeart Radio. It is written, hosted, and produced by me
Jamie Loftus. Our executive producers are Sophia Lechterman and Robert Evans.
The amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor.

Speaker 1 (01:18:32):
Our theme song is by Sad thirteen. Voice acting is
from Brandt Crater and pet shout outs to our dog
producer Anderson, my kat's flea Casper, and my pet rock Bird,
who will outlive us all Bye.