Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) - the smell doctor who was 'too woke': dr. ally louks

Episode Date: April 8, 2025

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-activismSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hello, 16th minute listeners. It's Jamie. Just saying really quick at the top that a show that is my honor to produce on the IHeart Radio Network, Wee the Unhoused, has been nominated for a Webby, and we need your help. If you haven't listened to the show before, first of you. of all, I highly recommend you do, but it is a show that began in 2019. It's created, posted, and reported by the wonderful Theo Henderson. He began the podcast while living on the streets of L.A. 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 Webby 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 in the description. And inhale deeply, baby, here is our Dr. Allie 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'm 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 dull sense of smell compared to other mammals. And to be clear, So let me be clear. This is a myth that I believed until like six days ago. But that is not actually true. According to a 27 research paper from Rutgers University professor John McAnne, as it turns out, humans have a sense of smell that is arguably as acute as man. mammals that we think have a keener sense of smell than we do. And while his numbers are generally thought to be overstated, McGahn published in 2017 that we can identify close to one trillion separate scents, as opposed to the 10,000 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 McGahn said back in 2017. 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 since 2017, 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.

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 Mushembled. Definitely got that wrong. And with all due respect to the author, most of this book harps on the history of people being obsessed with the smell of their own farts

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. Per the author, smell is just as much, if not more connected, to learn 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 were 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 scents 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 taxisers, 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, J.K. Rowling? Please turn it off. But in Moochambleed'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 age specifically. I read somewhere that their periods attract bears. The bears can smell the menstruation. You hear that, Ed? Bears.

Now you're putting the whole station in 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 qualities that men are conditioned to find desirable were 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 bell. 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 500 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. Now, 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, getting funding for anything outside of what smells can sell can be a real challenge. In the modern age, Moochimlet argues that our pushing smell aside as a powerful sense

is very intentional. He writes, Our deodorized world now offers a kind of antidotes to existential anguish as olfactory silence has developed in parallel with the silence surrounding disease and death, dating from around the same time. 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, the more crucial these lived connections become.

Because while social norms dictate the way that one interprets the scent of a woman, Al Pacino, scent of a woman, should make you feel one way or another. It's had varying results, while remaining. an intense fixation and subject of discussion. Pliny the Elder. Yes, we're going back that far. Pliny the elder said that the scent of menstruating people, just their existence, caused horses to have abortions. Really think about that. Then, paradoxically, 16th 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 arsehole 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 death mongered as a way to scare dumbasses for centuries and counting, particularly in centuries where Western religion reigned. This is for, from 16th century writer, Lavinus Laminus. Since women abound with excrement and emit ill smells

because of their periods, they make all things worse and spoil their natural forces and innate qualities. But don't worry, if you go through menopause, you still smell fucking gross, and also you're old.

From Erasmus' 1511 work in praise of folly. Better sports still 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. 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 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 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 seeing, 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 there's 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 Ph.D. 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.com? It went really well. Dr. Allie Luke's, a.k.a. the student who went viral for her thesis paper on smell being too woke, your 16th minute starts now. minute of fame Sixteen minute of fame Sixteen minute

to face one more minute at fame Not so bad when you take it on my mind I'm another chance

to say you're so goodbye Welcome back to 16th 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 Dr. Allie 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? What an asshole!

In all seriousness, I was very lucky to get to speak with Dr. Ali Luk's. 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 20. 24. Very recent story, 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 Alley'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 10 years, it makes the most sense to focus on student advocacy for 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 the moment Tufts University graduate student Rumaesa Ozturk was arrested and taken into federal custody. Doorbell camera footage obtained by NBC News shows two. Two plain clothes officers approaching the 30-year-old in Somerville outside of Boston. Oz Turk at first appears to back away before more agents approach. 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 as anti-genocide, but as anti-Semitic, even with a 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 27, 2024. 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 he is already 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 Haley Welch, aka the Hawk toa Girl, will release what she does not yet know is the final episode of Talk Toa Girl. 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 Mangione will assassinate a health care executive after being, to quote producer of this very show, Robert Evans, radicalized by pain. This past week, legacy media and lonely cat-owning true crime podcast fans were obsessed with

a mysterious man who down Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare. Even when there was only just fuzzy surveillance footage, thirsty men and women calling him things like socialist daddy putting him on a pedal still for literally a stranger in the back and then running away from the authorities. You tell him, 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 Allie-Lukes, And that's Dr. Alley-Lukes to you, was about 27 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 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 27th, she posted to her Twitter slash X account with a selfie of Allie and her now professionally bound thesis. She wears a simple red sweater and smiles, captioning the photo. Thrill to say, I passed my Viva with no corrections and I'm officially Ph. done. Grad student lingo, don't worry about it.

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 crypto-nihilist freaks is the title of the paper she's written. An embossed gold text on the red leather cover, Dr. Allie Luchs wrote her Cambridge University thesis on... Full Factory Ethics, the Politics of Smell, and Modern and Contemporary Prose. smell and not just smell but how smell has been characterized in literature an obscure topic sure social function not immediately obvious fair even allie gets why the function of her thesis paper might not be immediately obvious to those 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 read, Extremely fortunate that I get to teach in a place as beautiful as this. And the other was a photo of her on campus from June of 2024, reading, I submitted my PhD thesis today. This was an account for her.

years, 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 on 16th minute all the way last spring, in that Dr. Allie was definitely not trying to get this thesis 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 2024 Twitter slash X algorithm, one that, as we discussed in our Haley Welch-Hawk to a series,

is conditioned to boost emotionally driven content and most importantly elevate the replies of paying subscribers. So the blue check freaks, I was really, referring to. And through this pay-to-play, increasingly fascistic platform that long-time users had been departing in the millions and continue to now, Dr. Alley'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. Or those wondering, her Ph.D. thesis, per abstract, is basically on why it's racist and or classist 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 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? Okay, well done, boys.

While the algorithm is the original offender for driving harassment toward Dr. 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 story does go viral in a way that crosses into the mainstream press, which, as we've discussed, is pretty rare these days.

And Dr. 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 followed. Why this Cambridge grad's PhD thesis on smelly people is dividing the internet, olfactory

oppression. They attacked her PhD. Now this smell expert is making X her classroom. In defense of writing a quirky thesis on the politics of smell in modern literature. 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. The thesis states that olfactory disgust can result in a person's rejection.

Online critics needed smelling salts after reading what they deemed to be woke-sounding academic gobbledy cook. And while very little of this coverage is outright hostile to Dr. Ali Luke's very few I was able to find seemed 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 frame the topic as Allie applying a system of ethics to how marginalized 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, and the social moors 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 underestimated and misunderstood. There is value to this. So why can people not take it seriously? Here I want to again bring up the 2022 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 10,000 or so followers on Twitter. My husband and I wake 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 ran out of things to talk to. Love him so much. 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 20-something, think cottage core fans and made its way into the general cesspool. The most popular critique 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 finally, there was some light coverage from places like BuzzFeed and Page 6 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 2022, 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 Dr. 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 hurt. harassed over nothing, grew no fault of their own. But there are a few differences between these

stories. In Dr. Ali's case, 2024 gave the internet and Twitter two 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 2022. X premium, formerly known as Twitter Blue. Where in previous years, a blue check beside your Twitter username 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 controversy 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, a tax on Dr. 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 Allie'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 Dr. Alley from wanting people to understand where she was coming from. While replying to as many people as she could, which is no small task for a relatively offline person who was suddenly exposed to millions of accounts, Allie replied to the original, now wildly viral post with clarification on what her thesis was actually about. She writes, to be clear, this app track 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's the abstract for my PhD thesis, which I hope provides more context for anyone interested in learning about my work. She then posts her abstract. 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 smells application in creating and

subverting gender class, sexual, racial, and species power structures. I focus largely on prose fiction from the modern contemporary periods, so as to trace the legacy of olfactory prejudice in today and situate its contemporary relevance. 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 Dr. Alley 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 as smell, something almost everybody needs. 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 Dr. Allie in 24 and Daisy Miller in 2022 respond to this absolute torrential downpour of hate in the comments is how they respond as individuals. Because unlike Daisy, Dr. Allie engages with her haters with a relatively and I think incredibly, incredibly even keel for weeks.

Here's an example of her thoughtfully engaging with an absolute chode, as long as said chode was expressing a thought that wasn't just outright misogyny. The commenter writes, We need a new prefix for people with academic PhDs. Doctor should mean something. Dr. Allie 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? The amount of times that Dr. Alley-Lukes 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 patients 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 didn't or couldn't affect her. It was a deeply stressful factor. And I think the most extreme examples she shared is this tweet about the fact that she needed to report a threat to the authorities on December 1st, 2024. Allie writes, to be clear, this is where I draw the line.

This is abhorred and illegal and no one should ever have to deal with this. Attached is a screenshot of an email she received on her academic email earlier that day, which reads and trigger warnings. 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 society are many. and me and the boys will rape them out of you. 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 to anything, but it's egregious here. This was not in response to a high. hot take, virtually all of the harassment Dr. Alley 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 Dr. Allie 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, Allie 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 Dr. Alley doesn't draw much attention to this in subsequent press appearances,

this is just as good a 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's been a number of studies on how safe people and marginalized people specifically felt online after reports of online harassment had scaled up significantly. 16% of respondents told the Pew Research Center that they had been harassed online in 2014, a number that increased to 28% by 2021. These numbers then increased dramatically when narrowed to just speaking to women. The World Wide Web Foundation's 2020 study said that over half of women and girl respondents had been harassed online before, and that 87% 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 time frame. 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 re-election 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 Dr. Allie 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 clout and personal profit, and pushing their content there. It's a kind of harassment that wouldn't have been possible 10 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. Dr. Allie 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 historically and expectedly dog shit at dealing with them. Dr. Alley 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, I didn't know that this was going to get out of hand until probably 48 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. So in the front-facing media sense, sense, Dr. 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. out, is a chance to make 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, Dr. 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 undereducated 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. 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 have showed enthusiasm toward 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. It's still term time here,

deserve my time and attention. In the context of my thesis, yes, in order to understand how authors use olfactory messaging, we must recognize that smell is linked to different identity characteristics, for example, class race, in different ways, and that sometimes these characteristics overlap creating complexity. 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 200,000 followers on Twitter, where she still bravely posts. Ordinarily, in 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, and 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, Dr. 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, Dr. Allie Lukes tells us what the whole experience was like from her side of the keyboard. Crall. Tickets are on sale now at AXS.com. Get your tickets today. AXS.com. Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace.

You discover the depths of your mother's illness, the way it has echoed and reverberated throughout your life, impacting your very legacy. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the profound and powerful stories I'll be mining on our 12th season of Family Secrets. With over 37 million downloads, we continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. I can't wait to share 10 powerful new episodes with you, stories of tangled up identities, concealed truths,

and the way in which family secrets almost always need to be told. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of Family Secrets. Listen to Family Secrets, Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth? Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced. He said, you are a number, a New York state number, and we own you. Shock incarceration, also known as boot camp.

are short-term, highly regimented correctional programs that mimic military basic training. These programs aim to provide a shock of prison life, emphasizing strict discipline, physical training, hard labor, and rehabilitation programs. Mark had one chance to complete this program and had no idea of the hell awaiting him the next six months. The first night was so overwhelming,

and you don't know who's next to you. And we didn't know what to expect in the morning. Nobody tells you anything. Listen to shock incarceration on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sometimes it's hard to remember, but... Going through something like that is a traumatic experience, but it's also not the end of their life. That was my dad, reminding me and so many others who need to hear it, that our trauma is not our shame to carry, and that we have big, bold, and beautiful lives to live after what happened to us. I'm your host and co-president of this organization.

Dr. Leitra Tate. On my new podcast, The Unwanted Sorority, we wade through transformation to peel back healing and reveal what it actually looks like and sounds like in real time. Each week, I sit down with people who live through harm,

carried silence, and are now reshaping the systems that failed us. We're going to talk about the adultification of black girls, mothering as resistance, and the tools we use for healing. The unwanted sorority is a safe space, not a quiet space.

So let's lock in. We're moving towards living. Liberation together. Listen to the unwanted sorority, new episodes every Thursday on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to 16th 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 Dermit 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 say the name Dermot Mulroney. Like your name is Dermot

Mulroney? I'm Dermot. No, it's not. And here's my interview with the wonderful Dr. Ali Luchs. I'm Dr. Ali Lukes. I'm currently a supervisor in English literature at the University of Cambridge and I work on smell. 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? I was not always into olfactory 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. What were you studying? English literature. So I, I did English literature at undergrad.

English issues in modern culture at UCL for my master's degree. And everyone called us the issues students, which I felt was not very complimentary. My work, even at Exeter, was relatively interdisciplinary in that I was kind of given free reign to draw on philosophy and sociology in my work. But my master's degree was really my kind of first foreign 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. I just knew that 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, that Smell was used as a kind of political agent in those books. You know better than anyone. I feel like probably the least examined sense or least considered sense. It's always the one that I say I would give up. And you're not alone. I very often do this thing with my students where I ask 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. And then everyone else gets interested in it.

And they start re-evaluating their biases. Tastes suddenly found dead in a ditch. I mean, and so you over the course of higher education, you become drawn to the this very particular area of study. What existed around this area of study? I honestly have no idea. 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 access to basically everything.

The first smell studies academic article I found was this article called What's This Smell by Hans Rindersbacher? 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.edu, so that was great. I'm really, 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 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. What is your relationship with the internet like growing up and into college sort of alongside your journey towards smell studies? 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've been spending so much time on the internet, I still read more than I look at my social media. I was born 97, so 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 just, I would rather read books. Like I grew up with audiobooks on the day. you could find me painting or drawing whilst listening to an audio book. That is how I wanted to spend my time and it's how I still want to spend my time. Nothing has changed. 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 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 in smell studies, kind of over years of studying it during my undergrad and my master's, but I was studying it in usually historical contexts. So I kind of purposefully left a gap for the PhD where I would finally get to talk about modern and contemporary literature. It turned out that 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. That's 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. So you complete your thesis. When do you complete your thesis? I completed my thesis in June 2024. I think some people feel very ambivalently towards their PhD thesis and the 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 infused as when I started, if not more, actually, because the more you learn about smell, the more fascinating it is, honestly. You have this beautiful, like, bound version of your thesis. And you log on to formerly Twitter.com. How often were you posting on this platform? What was your standing relationship with this platform on the day? 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 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 still there, and they might want to know that I'm done,

because they might have, like, potential post-stop 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 300 or so people that I followed on Twitter. 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? 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 felt, even though I was uncomfortable about the attention, it felt fine. Right. But then after about 48 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 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 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? I do think, like, it was such a whirlwind that even though in general I have quite a good

memory for 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 was one where someone was like, your ancestors were fighting mountain lions. And you are disgracing them. I was like, where do you, who do you think I am and where do you think I live? I am as British as it gets. Yeah, that is, I find 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? 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 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. Even as I thought I was doing quite a good job of keeping up with the replies, I was still missing them like 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's 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

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 the 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. So we'll be right back with more from Dr. Alice. our iHeart radio music festival presented by capital one is coming back to las vegas september 19th and 20th streaming live only on hulu ladies and gentlemen brian adams ed sherin fade chlorilla jelly roll chan fogerty lil wane l l.l cool jay maria carey maroon 5 sammy hagar tape mccray the offspring tim mcraw tickets We're on sale now at aXS.com. Get your tickets today. AXS.com. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable.

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the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases, to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness, the way it has echoed and reverberated throughout your life, impacting your very legacy. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the profound and powerful stories I'll be mining on. on our 12th season of Family Secrets.

With over 37 million downloads, we continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. I can't wait to share 10 powerful new episodes with you, stories of tangled up identities, concealed truths, and the way in which family secrets almost always need to be told. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of Family Secrets.

Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Ed. Everyone say, hello, Ed. From a very rural background myself, my dad is a farmer, and my mom is a cousin, so, like, it's not like... What do you get when a true crime producer walks into a comedy club? I know it sounds like the start of a bad joke, but that really was my reality nine years ago. I just normally do straight stand-up, but this is a bit different. On stage stood a comedian with a story that no one expected to hear. Well, 22nd of July 2015, a 23-year-old man had killed his family.

And then he came to my house. So what do you get when a true crime producer walks into a comedy club? A new podcast called Wisecrack, where stand-up comedy and murder takes center stage. Available now. Listen to Wisecrack on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. heriting 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 Dr. Allie Luke's. 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? 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 had been given an opportunity to do that in a 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 we all talk to each other and we're all kind of interested 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 and making sure that, you know, everybody has access to those resources, but it's not possible to tell based on a picture of someone 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 experience 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 But the post went viral towards the end of term. So I think I had about 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're on BBC News.

What's that about? And yeah, and a couple of them were, you know, really warrens. 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 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. Were you happy with the way that your story was being framed in the media? Were you wanting to engage? 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 a comment and trying to sift through like hundreds of emails every day. I was happy 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. They've done a couple of articles now, and they've been really kind of glowing,

and I'm still unsure as to how I've pulled that off. Did you feel pressure to be more online after this happened? I did feel pressure, but I also received. existed 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 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 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. 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. well I'm 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 um I I am a writer and I do think that my ideas are probably best conveyed in the form of like long form prose so I think if people are are interested in the ideas, then they're going to love the trade book. But now that this sort of massive, unexpected thing has happened, yeah, what is your takeaway been from having survived the main character experience and been able to return to your normal life? I have not returned to my normal life.

Okay. Say more about 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 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 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 would feel maybe concerned about the idea that their sense of smell could be doing something that they're not aware of. I think that's maybe a little, it's suspicious and I can see why people would be worried about it. I don't really see why people would react with quite the amount of vitriol that they did, but then again, 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. What is next for this field of study? What would you like to see happen moving forward?

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'm already in the process of this I'm developing a postdoctoral project that would study the effects of smell disorders okay this is like you know post well we say post COVID but that is a really contentious thing especially in the US in comparison to the UK but it's estimated that something like 27 million people still have long long-lasting damage to their sense of smell and their sense of taste because the sense of smell is up to 95% well, it's flavor. It's not taste is separable. I'm going to get into a whole

thing. It doesn't even matter really. Don't get her started. Don't get her started. 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 of losing your sense of smell. So I think a project that studies the effects of smell disorders would really help to completely reevaluate 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 is cooking.

The other reason that studying smell disorders is really important is because evidence, recent evidence, starting in about 2003, 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 warehouses because they're cheap those houses are cheap and that is a serious problem it's a serious problem

that really is we're only just starting to talk about in the smell studies community let alone in the kind of broader public discourse. And I'm sure people have asked you this before. What is your favorite smell? What is the best smell to you? My go-to answer now, because people have asked me this and I've been stopped.

I have to imagine, yeah. Is fresh garden sage. Like garden sage, when you like tear up a leaf, that smell is my favorite. Wow, you're literally out there touching grass doing the thing that everyone's telling each other to do in the internet. I am obsessed with smell. 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. Clearly, yeah.

And it has been notoriously difficult to get funding to do work. on smell because 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 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 literary studies specifically

is kind of open to reinvention in the process of new interdisciplinary encounters that 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 the, 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 fearmongering 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 and and pushed 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 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 what you know what's the point at the end of it, how is it going to get me a job? And 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. Thank you so much for making time for this. I really appreciate it. It's an absolute pleasure. Thank you for asking me. Thanks so much to Dr. 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 Allie'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 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 so frustrating that academics like Alley-Lukes 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 Allie. I have a good feeling. Because whether those chose on X, believe it or not, work like hers can really make a huge difference. Dr. Alley Luke's, your 16th Minute ends now. 16th 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 Sophie Liechtenman and Rob Evan Evans. The amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor. Our theme song is

by Sad 13. Voice acting is from Grant Crater. And pet shoutouts to our dog producer Anderson, my cats flea and Casper, and my pet rock bird who will outlive us all. Bye. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebeney, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebeney, and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. It's Black Business Month, and Money and Wealth podcast with John Hope Bryant is tapping in. I'm breaking down how to build wealth, create opportunities.

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