Speaker 1: Cool Media. Hello sixteenth minute listeners. It's Jamie just saying
Speaker 1: really quick at the top that a show that is
Speaker 1: my honor to produce on the iHeartRadio network. We the
Speaker 1: Unhoused has been nominated for a webby and we need
Speaker 1: your help. If you haven't listened to the show before,
Speaker 1: first of all, I highly recommend you do. But it
Speaker 1: is a show that began in twenty nineteen. It's created, hosted,
Speaker 1: and reported by the wonderful Theo Henderson. He began the
Speaker 1: podcast while living on the streets of LA and it's
Speaker 1: grown significantly during that time, but remains the only podcast
Speaker 1: that tells stories that affect the unhoused and tells the
Speaker 1: stories of the unhoused while continuing to center their own
Speaker 1: perspectives and experiences. We've been nominated in a web category
Speaker 1: and we need your help. If you click the link
Speaker 1: in the description, it goes directly to our category. It's
Speaker 1: literally two clicks. It's a tight race, so I would
Speaker 1: really appreciate it if you both gave us a vote
Speaker 1: and also checked out the show. You can do both
Speaker 1: at the link and the description and Inhale deeply Baby.
Speaker 1: Here is our doctor Ali Luke's episode if you were
Speaker 1: to give up any of your five senses, which would
Speaker 1: it be, statistically one in two of you just decided
Speaker 1: probably my sense of smell. And I am honestly with
Speaker 1: you there. I think I had a roommate once who
Speaker 1: truly did not have a sense of smell, or a
Speaker 1: very dull sense of smell. Maybe he was lying now
Speaker 1: that I'm saying it out loud. Either way, the place
Speaker 1: smelled terrible and it made my life a living nightmare.
Speaker 1: And it turns out that a lot of the reason
Speaker 1: why you might have been so quick to forfeit your
Speaker 1: sense of smell might have something to do with an
Speaker 1: extremely powerful myth that humans have a very sense of
Speaker 1: smell compared to other mammals. And to be clear, what
Speaker 1: may be clear, this is a myth that I believed
Speaker 1: until like six days ago, but that is not actually true.
Speaker 1: According to a twenty seven research paper from Rutgers University
Speaker 1: professor John McGann, as, it turns out, humans have a
Speaker 1: sense of smell that is arguably as acute as mammals
Speaker 1: that we think have a keener sense of smell than
Speaker 1: we do. And while his numbers are generally thought to
Speaker 1: be overstated, McGann published in twenty seventeen that we can
Speaker 1: identify close to one trillion separate sense as opposed to
Speaker 1: the ten thousand that's commonly cited, and to introduce a
Speaker 1: returning villain from our last series. Part of the reason
Speaker 1: that this misconception around smell has become ingrained in our
Speaker 1: consciousness is because of one Sigmund Freud. Professor McGann said
Speaker 1: back in twenty seventeen.
Speaker 2: It has been a long cultural belief that in order
Speaker 2: to be a reasonable or rational person, you could not
Speaker 2: be dominated by a sense of smell. Smell was linked
Speaker 2: to earthly animalistic tendencies, and.
Speaker 1: Since twenty seventeen it has been debunked that we can
Speaker 1: discern a trillion smells. But this is just another piece
Speaker 1: of evidence that this area of humankind is wildly under explored.
Speaker 1: There have since been numerous attempts to identify with more
Speaker 1: specificity where exactly humans stand in the mammal smelling hierarchy.
Speaker 1: But as more time and funding has been put into
Speaker 1: this line of study, it's become clear that our species
Speaker 1: reputation as bad smellers is definitely false and possibly a
Speaker 1: misguided way to make us feel better than the other
Speaker 1: mammalian girls. Basically, a de emphasis on smell seems to
Speaker 1: be part of how humans have been propped up to
Speaker 1: be better than other species. In reality, that's not just
Speaker 1: far from the truth, but we rely on our sense
Speaker 1: of smell far more than we seem to realize. For
Speaker 1: the last week or so, I've been reading a book
Speaker 1: called Smells, A Cultural History of odors in Early modern
Speaker 1: Times by French writer Robert Mushambled. Definitely got that wrong,
Speaker 1: and with all due respect to the author, most of
Speaker 1: this book PARPs on the history of people being obsessed
Speaker 1: with the smell of their own parts and whether they
Speaker 1: or their spouse's pussy is stinky or not. And if
Speaker 1: this is something you think about a lot, I guess
Speaker 1: I recommend the book. But within this book I genuinely
Speaker 1: learned a lot about the fundamentals of smell that I
Speaker 1: had completely misunderstood or have been miseducated on. Heard the
Speaker 1: author smell is just as much, if not more, connected
Speaker 1: to learned experience as it is to natural instinct, and
Speaker 1: he argues it's the only one of our senses to
Speaker 1: be truly learned. It's also been speculated that our sense
Speaker 1: of taste heavily relies on our sense of smell that
Speaker 1: influences the smells that we're drawn to or gain pleasure by,
Speaker 1: and has a hand in explaining why the smells we
Speaker 1: find pleasant can be so different, and whether you believe
Speaker 1: in horny pheromone sense or not, it influences the smells
Speaker 1: that we're repulsed by as well. That is to say,
Speaker 1: with enough convincing, your nose can and is trained to
Speaker 1: distrust someone else by their smell. And while some of
Speaker 1: you are shaking your heads until they fall off your neck,
Speaker 1: there is an argument that there is really no such
Speaker 1: thing as a bad smell. There are instead smells we
Speaker 1: learn through experience to interpret as bad, whether this is
Speaker 1: for social or survival purposes, and this can lead to
Speaker 1: encouraging or helping to form any number of societally induced discriminations.
Speaker 1: Linked to our sense of smell is a strong tradition
Speaker 1: of classism, as well as racism and xenophobia. But for
Speaker 1: the purposes of our guest today, I'm going to zone
Speaker 1: in on one particular aspect of the socialized learning of smell,
Speaker 1: how your nose can tell you to hate women, and
Speaker 1: to be clear, the way that most texts about how
Speaker 1: misogyny and the sense of smell are intertwined, and there's
Speaker 1: not many define what a woman is is extremely myopic,
Speaker 1: and by that I mean these texts generally define women
Speaker 1: as people with wombs. I hope you don't need me
Speaker 1: to tell you that a person with a womb does
Speaker 1: not a woman make And if I do have to
Speaker 1: explain that to you, how did you find my podcast
Speaker 1: JK Rowling? Please turn it off? But in Mutchambled's work
Speaker 1: in particular, we are trained to see women or as
Speaker 1: the case may be, people with wombs, historically subjugated in
Speaker 1: a few distinct ways by encouraging disgust or even inventing
Speaker 1: smells around menstruation and a specifically.
Speaker 2: I read somewhere that their periods attract bears. The bears
Speaker 2: can smell the menstruation.
Speaker 3: Hear the head bears.
Speaker 2: Now you put in the whole station in.
Speaker 1: Jeopardy basically in a heteronormative structure. Give me a horn
Speaker 1: for the term heteronormative women that men were trained to
Speaker 1: view as disgusting when it came to fucking or making
Speaker 1: them wives. You know the deal. But interestingly, even the
Speaker 1: quality is that men are conditioned to find desirable were
Speaker 1: also sometimes dismissed based on their smell. Throughout time, there
Speaker 1: have been associations with excess perfume in the West, categorized
Speaker 1: as smelling slutty, and there's also been writings of rich
Speaker 1: women's farts smelling better question mark and please don't get
Speaker 1: me started, because I do not want to get into it.
Speaker 1: But yes, there is a huge amount of weird poetry
Speaker 1: going back five hundred years or more about how pussy
Speaker 1: is stinky, but I like it. Shut up, I'm kidding.
Speaker 1: If you listen to the end of the episode, I
Speaker 1: will share one of these disgusting poems.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 1: Part of the reason we know so little about smell
Speaker 1: at the Earth's advanced age, the author argues, is because
Speaker 1: there is very little encouragement under capitalism to learn more
Speaker 1: about smell. That is, there's not much money in this
Speaker 1: line of study unless you're trying to identify what is
Speaker 1: going to sell deodorant and candles, and so to this day,
Speaker 1: getting funding for anything outside of what smells can sell
Speaker 1: can be a real challenge in the modern age. Muchumbled
Speaker 1: argues that our pushing smell aside as a powerful sense
Speaker 1: is very intentional.
Speaker 2: He writes, our deodorized world now offers a kind of
Speaker 2: antidote to existential anguish as olfactory silence has developed in
Speaker 2: parallel with the silence surrounding disease and death dating from
Speaker 2: around the same time.
Speaker 1: But there's no such thing as a deodorized society, whether
Speaker 1: we're afraid of death or not. So much of the
Speaker 1: way people have interpreted smell over time has been subjective,
Speaker 1: depending on the way that they were encouraged to see, interpret,
Speaker 1: and experience shitting and death mainly, among other things. And
Speaker 1: the further back you go from modern medicine and plumbing,
Speaker 1: the more crucial these lived connections become. Because while social
Speaker 1: norms dictate the way that one interprets the scent of
Speaker 1: a woman out a cheating.
Speaker 2: Scent of a woman.
Speaker 1: Should make you feel one way or another, it's had
Speaker 1: varying results while remaining an intense fixation and subject of discussion.
Speaker 1: Bliny the Elder, Yes, we're going back that far. Bliney
Speaker 1: the Elder said that the scent of menstruating people just
Speaker 1: their existence caused horses to have abortions. Really think about that, then. Paradoxically,
Speaker 1: sixteenth century writer Marguerite de Navarre implied that infertile women's
Speaker 1: butts smell better than fertile women. This type of speculation
Speaker 1: spread misogyny and xenophobia at once, with a different author
Speaker 1: from this same era saying, quote, the arsful of an
Speaker 1: Italian woman could only be a sewer unquote, and I
Speaker 1: took that personally. Menstruation has long been encouraged to be
Speaker 1: seen as a site of terror and evil, Its connection
Speaker 1: to implied life or deathmongered as a way to scare
Speaker 1: dumbasses for centuries and counting, particularly in centuries where Western
Speaker 1: religion reigned. This is from sixteenth century writer Lavinous Laminius.
Speaker 2: Since women abound with excrement and emit ill smells because
Speaker 2: of their periods, they make all things worse and spoil
Speaker 2: than natural forces and innate qualities.
Speaker 1: But don't worry, if you go through menopause, you still
Speaker 1: smell fucking gross, and also you're old. From Erasmus is
Speaker 1: fifteen eleven work in praise of folly.
Speaker 2: Better sports tale is to see those decrepit old women.
Speaker 2: That old age seems long since to have cut off
Speaker 2: from the number of the living, those strolling corpses, those
Speaker 2: stinking carcasses, which everywhere exhale a sepulchral odor, and yet
Speaker 2: who cry at every moment. Nothing is sweeter than life.
Speaker 1: So, if you're keeping score, if you menstruated, you stank
Speaker 1: of the devil, but once you didn't menstruate, you stank
Speaker 1: of a corpse. And this smell was directly connected in
Speaker 1: both cases with Satan himself, whose period is gnarly, I'm sure.
Speaker 1: And while there are countless examples that draw smell as
Speaker 1: an indicator of character of where one should stand in
Speaker 1: an enforced hierarchy, there's been shockingly little recognition that that's
Speaker 1: what we're either doing, being subjected to, or both. But
Speaker 1: if the last week of my life has been any indication,
Speaker 1: it's the kind of thing you can't unsmell once you've
Speaker 1: noticed it. We're subtly signaled on how to feel about
Speaker 1: a character in media, written or otherwise all the time
Speaker 1: based on how they smell. And I'm typing this while
Speaker 1: I frantically apply perfume to my wrists out of self consciousness.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying let's stop showering. I'm saying that we
Speaker 1: lead by our noses more than we think, and it's
Speaker 1: something that it's going to take years to fully understand,
Speaker 1: because not only is the present history of smell important
Speaker 1: to our daily lives, there's a few crucial people in
Speaker 1: this field arguing that it's just as crucial to the future.
Speaker 1: And that brings us to today, a day where there is,
Speaker 1: from what I can tell, more being written about the
Speaker 1: cultural history of smell than ever, and they're there is
Speaker 1: less public encouragement, particularly online, to engage with the humanities
Speaker 1: in this way than in years prior. So keep your
Speaker 1: nose down if you know this one already. But what
Speaker 1: happens when a young woman celebrates her PhD on how
Speaker 1: smell has been portrayed in literature to distinguish racial class
Speaker 1: and gender prejudice a young queer woman at that on
Speaker 1: the absolute cesspool once known as Twitter dot com. It
Speaker 1: went really well, Doctor Allie Luke's aka the student who
Speaker 1: went viral for her thesis paper on smell being too woke.
Speaker 1: Your sixteenth minute starts now join Welcome back to sixteenth Minute,
Speaker 1: the podcast where we talk to the Internet's main characters
Speaker 1: see how their moment in the spotlight affected them and
Speaker 1: what that says about us and the Internet. And this
Speaker 1: week we are visiting a pretty recent story. One you
Speaker 1: might have heard of the tale of doctor Ali Lukes,
Speaker 1: who ended up on the wrong side of the Twitter
Speaker 1: algorithm after committing the heinous crime of completing over a
Speaker 1: decade's worth of higher education studying an underappreciated but critically
Speaker 1: necessary intersection of science and the humanities. How dare she?
Speaker 4: What?
Speaker 1: An asshole? In all seriousness, I was very lucky to
Speaker 1: get to speak with doctor Ali Lukes. She is wonderful
Speaker 1: and this story in particular, I think has a lot
Speaker 1: to say about where our relationship with the internet is
Speaker 1: right now. So let's get into it. Come with me
Speaker 1: if you dare to. November twenty twenty four. Very recent story,
Speaker 1: to be sure, but in a world this completely dystopian,
Speaker 1: it is worth putting ourselves in a moment online down
Speaker 1: to the finest detail, because if you haven't noticed, it's
Speaker 1: an exceptionally difficult time to be a student. The example
Speaker 1: we're talking about today is Allie's one that is centered
Speaker 1: on cyber attacks fueled by anti intellectualism, misogyny, and very
Speaker 1: likely bots. But it's far from the only uphill battle
Speaker 1: that students are facing right now. And while anti intellectualism
Speaker 1: has taken many forms, on college campuses in the last
Speaker 1: ten years, it makes the most sense to focus on
Speaker 1: student advocacy for a free Palestine and student groups pushing
Speaker 1: for university divestment from Israel. This mission expanded beyond Palestine
Speaker 1: for many groups in the last year and a half,
Speaker 1: and lists of demands put forward by students establishing encampments
Speaker 1: to both protest and push back on their university. Empowering
Speaker 1: other settler states has been critical. These groups also have
Speaker 1: sought to protect the student and staff's rights of any
Speaker 1: university to protest instead of This is.
Speaker 4: The moment Tuff's University graduate student Rumesa Oster was arrested
Speaker 4: and taken into federal custody. Doorbell camera footage obtained by
Speaker 4: NBC News shows two plain clothes officers approaching the thirty
Speaker 4: year old in Somerville outside of Boston. Os Turk at
Speaker 4: first appears to back away before more agents approach.
Speaker 1: This also comes with, to no one's surprise, a tremendous
Speaker 1: amount of xenophobia and racism by the students who are
Speaker 1: working within these spaces. There are countless examples of student
Speaker 1: protesters being profiled by race, particularly Palestinian, other Middle Eastern
Speaker 1: or black students. These students were and are characterized not
Speaker 1: as anti genocide but as anti Semitic, even with the
Speaker 1: large portion of student organizers being composed of young anti
Speaker 1: Zionist Jewish students and groups. And you don't need me
Speaker 1: to tell you that this profiling, censorship, and state violence
Speaker 1: has only escalated since Trump re entered the White House.
Speaker 1: But I digress. November twenty seventh, twenty twenty four, It's
Speaker 1: been less than a month since Donald Trump was re
Speaker 1: elected by America, this time without having to cheat his
Speaker 1: way into it and promising any number of horrifying policies
Speaker 1: before re entering office. As Joe Biden does his last
Speaker 1: few laps in the Olympic sized pool of lukewarm ice
Speaker 1: cream that he floated around in instead of doing anything.
Speaker 1: It's one day before Hailey Welch aka the Hawk Tua
Speaker 1: Girl will release what she does not yet know is
Speaker 1: the final episode of Talk To for over six months
Speaker 1: before the crypto scam she's become the face of is busted.
Speaker 1: And it's a week before internet boyfriend Luigi Mangioni will
Speaker 1: assassinate a healthcare executive after being the poat producer of
Speaker 1: this very show. Robert Evans radicalized by pain.
Speaker 5: This past week, legacy media and Lonely Cat owning true
Speaker 5: crime podcast fans were obsessed with the mysterious man Dan
Speaker 5: Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare, even though there
Speaker 5: was only just fuzzy surveillance footage, thirsty men and women
Speaker 5: calling him things like socialist Daddy, putting him on a
Speaker 5: pedalstal for literally a stranger in the back and then
Speaker 5: running away from the authorities.
Speaker 1: You tell, Ben. And even though it sounds counterintuitive that
Speaker 1: with all this going on, with the rights of immigrants,
Speaker 1: of trans people, of anyone who could need an abortion
Speaker 1: on the chopping block again or still, the Internet found
Speaker 1: some time and energy to bully a doctoral student for
Speaker 1: finishing her thesis because woke while Ali Lukes, and that's
Speaker 1: doctor Ali Lukes to you, was about twenty seven when
Speaker 1: all of this happened, and could barely remember a time
Speaker 1: before the Internet. She was not particularly logged in and
Speaker 1: didn't really want to be like a lot of PhD students.
Speaker 1: She's a book forward person, but she lives in a
Speaker 1: society and did have social media accounts that she used
Speaker 1: sparingly in order to keep in touch with friends and family,
Speaker 1: as well as to make professional connections in a field
Speaker 1: of study that was and is extremely specific and so.
Speaker 1: On November twenty seventh, she posted to her Twitter slash
Speaker 1: x account with the selfie of Ali and her now
Speaker 1: professionally bound thesis. She wears a simple red sweater and smiles,
Speaker 1: captioning the photo.
Speaker 3: Thrilled to say, I passed my VIVA with no corrections
Speaker 3: and an officially pH done.
Speaker 1: Grad student LINGO don't worry about it, but what gets
Speaker 1: people stirred up and through some opaque, algorithmically driven nightmare
Speaker 1: pushed into the feeds of hundreds of thousands of blue
Speaker 1: check AI Cryptonihilist Freaks is the title of the paper
Speaker 1: she's written, an embossed gold text on the red leather cover.
Speaker 1: Doctor Ali Lukes wrote her Cambridge University thesis on.
Speaker 3: O factory ethics, the politics of smell and modern and
Speaker 3: contemporary prose.
Speaker 1: Smell and not just smell, but how smell has been
Speaker 1: characterized in literature an obscure topic. Sure, social function not
Speaker 1: immediately obvious. Fair Even Ali gets why the function of
Speaker 1: her thesis paper might not be immediately obvious to those
Speaker 1: out of the know, as she will explain in our interview.
Speaker 1: But keep in mind she's not trying to get this
Speaker 1: out to a general public. She only has a couple
Speaker 1: hundred X followers at this time. Her last posts on
Speaker 1: the platform before this were months apart. One was a
Speaker 1: photo of the Cambridge campus that.
Speaker 3: Read extremely fortunate that I get to teach in a
Speaker 3: place as beautiful as this.
Speaker 1: And the other was a photo of her on campus
Speaker 1: from June of twenty twenty four, reading.
Speaker 3: I submitted my PhD thesis today.
Speaker 1: This was an account for her peers, professional and personal
Speaker 1: people who would most likely understand the function of her
Speaker 1: thesis paper because they were academics too. I'm reminded quite
Speaker 1: a bit of the Coffee in the Garden with my
Speaker 1: husband Saga when it comes to this story. It was
Speaker 1: actually one of the first episode topics that we covered
Speaker 1: on sixteenth Minute all the way last spring, in that
Speaker 1: doctor Alli was definitely not trying to get this pieceis
Speaker 1: announcement out to a larger audience. The only thing that
Speaker 1: made it possible for it to go viral anyways, was
Speaker 1: the fact that her account was a public one. Think
Speaker 1: of the conventional ways that we would try to court
Speaker 1: attention on social media if we wanted a post to
Speaker 1: get outside of our followers. It's generally a game of
Speaker 1: tagging right, add a hashtag tag the account of a
Speaker 1: larger institution or another account in the hopes that they
Speaker 1: will either engage with or repost it, And nothing like
Speaker 1: that is happening here. What's happening is the twenty twenty
Speaker 1: four Twitter slash x algorithm, one that, as we discussed
Speaker 1: in our Hailey Welch Talk TUA series, is conditioned to
Speaker 1: boost emotionally driven content and most importantly, elevate the replies
Speaker 1: of paying subscribers. So the blue check freaks I was
Speaker 1: referring to, and through this pay to play increasingly fascistic
Speaker 1: platform that longtime users had been departing in the millions
Speaker 1: and continue to now. Doctor Allie's inoffensive, celebratory post got
Speaker 1: sucked into this algorithm and pulled in some of the
Speaker 1: gnarliest Blue check comments ever generated by either a dumb
Speaker 1: man or AI trained on a dumb man. It's hard
Speaker 1: to tell. Sometimes. Buckle in.
Speaker 2: For those wondering her PhD thesis per abstract is basically
Speaker 2: on why it's racist and or classicist to not like
Speaker 2: it when people exhibit body odors consistent with poor hygiene.
Speaker 2: You would have spent your years better by getting married
Speaker 2: and having children. Oh look, another woman getting a useless
Speaker 2: degree that does nothing for the furtherance of society. Women
Speaker 2: would rather spend years pursuing stupid degrees that won't fulfill
Speaker 2: them over a family that actually will enjoy the debt,
Speaker 2: since nothing you learned or produced will ever be of
Speaker 2: any benefit to society. Adorable, but what can you do
Speaker 2: with this? pH dick?
Speaker 1: Okay, well done, boys. While the algorithm is the original
Speaker 1: offender for driving harassment towards doctor Allie, her post was
Speaker 1: further boosted in the algorithm when influential blue check accounts
Speaker 1: began to quote tweet the post with random misogynist criticisms
Speaker 1: of her. And while it took a few days, the
Speaker 1: story does go viral in a way that crosses into
Speaker 1: the mainstream press, which, as we've discussed, is pretty rare
Speaker 1: these days, and doctor Allie is, for the most part
Speaker 1: game to engage with the story going viral, and the
Speaker 1: benefit here, it seems, for her, is that she knows
Speaker 1: that what she does is niche, and she rightfully isn't
Speaker 1: taking the horrific bad faith criticism around it very seriously.
Speaker 1: Some headlines from the days that.
Speaker 2: Followed why this Cambridge Grads PhD thesis on smelly people
Speaker 2: is dividing the internet olfactory oppression.
Speaker 1: They attacked her PhD. Now this smell expert is making
Speaker 1: x her classroom.
Speaker 2: In defense of writing a quirky thesis on the politics
Speaker 2: of smell in modern literature.
Speaker 1: The tone of most of this coverage is nothing really surprising,
Speaker 1: and by that I mean so tremendously half cooked that
Speaker 1: it makes you want to rip your head off. Here
Speaker 1: is something from the New York Post.
Speaker 2: The thesis states that olfactory discussed can result in a
Speaker 2: person's rejection. Online critics needed smelling salts after reading what
Speaker 2: they deemed to be woke sounding, academic gobbledygook.
Speaker 1: And while very little of this coverage is outright hostile,
Speaker 1: who doctor Ali Luke's very few I was able to
Speaker 1: find seem to take the time to understand what her
Speaker 1: thesis was actually about, which we will get into the
Speaker 1: tone of So much of this criticism framed the topic
Speaker 1: as Ali applying a system of ethics to how marginalized
Speaker 1: people smell. But if you look at her abstract, which
Speaker 1: she shares, she makes it clear that it is not
Speaker 1: this simple. Instead, her paper is a look at how
Speaker 1: smell has been presented in literature over time in order
Speaker 1: to make a definitive statement about a marginalized person, and
Speaker 1: what that definitive statement says about the author, the place,
Speaker 1: and the social mores of the time in which it
Speaker 1: was written. You can hate the premise if you want,
Speaker 1: but taking a few seconds makes it clear that the
Speaker 1: point of her paper is to build out a cultural
Speaker 1: history of smell, the one sense that is still widely
Speaker 1: under estimated and misunderstood. There is value to this, so
Speaker 1: why can people not take it seriously? Here I want
Speaker 1: to again bring up the twenty twenty two case of
Speaker 1: the drinking coffee in the garden with my husband post
Speaker 1: because their similarities and differences I think are pretty instructive
Speaker 1: here as a refresher. If you haven't listened to this episode,
Speaker 1: and you should. User Daisy Miller posted this simple statement
Speaker 1: to her ten thousand or so followers on Twitter. My
Speaker 1: husband and I wake.
Speaker 3: Up every morning and bring our coffee out to our
Speaker 3: garden and sit and talk for hours every morning and
Speaker 3: never get sold, and we never run out of things
Speaker 3: to talk to. Love him so much.
Speaker 1: And as we unpacked in that episode, she got completely
Speaker 1: demolished in the replies. With a few rounds of discourse
Speaker 1: taking place, the tweet very quickly escaped its relatively small
Speaker 1: intended audience of twenty something cottage core fans and made
Speaker 1: its way into the uneneral cesspool, the most popular critique
Speaker 1: at the time being that Daisy was bragging or being
Speaker 1: insensitive to class by posting this. The first round of
Speaker 1: discourse was backlash to Daisy herself. The second round of
Speaker 1: discourse was backlash to the backlash, where thousands came to
Speaker 1: Daisy's defense saying that this was an innocuous statement. And
Speaker 1: finally there was some light coverage from places like BuzzFeed
Speaker 1: and Page six before the whole story kind of petered out.
Speaker 1: Daisy did interact with the story at first, but only
Speaker 1: for a short amount of time. She stayed positive, but
Speaker 1: ultimately and rightfully seemed overwhelmed by the attention and migrated platforms.
Speaker 1: This was in the fall of twenty twenty two, about
Speaker 1: six months after Elon Musk bought Twitter as a joke
Speaker 1: and then tried to save face by turning it into
Speaker 1: a hub for fascist thought, and so a big similarity
Speaker 1: between Daisy's story and doctor Ali Luke's story is that
Speaker 1: these were posts made by women for a very specific audience,
Speaker 1: but the criticism that they received was a result of
Speaker 1: the algorithm pushing these posts into the feed of people
Speaker 1: who would probably hate it, ostensibly because these people would
Speaker 1: engage with it. And to be clear, this is requiring
Speaker 1: some guesswork on my part because of all the secret
Speaker 1: policy that Twitter has managed to accidentally leak over the
Speaker 1: last couple of years, big scary algorithm changes do not
Speaker 1: tend to be one of them. But on its face,
Speaker 1: both of these examples are Elon era Twitter harassment stories,
Speaker 1: where the machine has been calibrated to get women harassed
Speaker 1: over nothing through no fault of their own. But there
Speaker 1: are a few differences between these stories. In doctor Alli's case,
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four gave the Internet and Twitter too full
Speaker 1: years to descend further into anti intellectualism, and in a
Speaker 1: more concrete sense, the replies that got the most boost
Speaker 1: in the algorithm were different from Daisy's experience, and that
Speaker 1: is because of a very cursed program that was rolled
Speaker 1: out in the month after Coffee in the Garden with
Speaker 1: my husband in November twenty twenty two x premium formerly
Speaker 1: known as Twitter Blue, where in previous years a blue
Speaker 1: check beside your Twitter user name was free and the
Speaker 1: result of being verified as a prominent person or brand
Speaker 1: on the app. This new program allowed for as low
Speaker 1: as eight bucks a month to receive this blue check
Speaker 1: as a veneer of distinction, as well as ensuring that
Speaker 1: if you replied to a tweet that your reply would
Speaker 1: be boosted in the algorithm to show up before most
Speaker 1: unpaid users, regardless of how popular your reply was. There
Speaker 1: was a lot of contray over this program and continues
Speaker 1: to be, but most of the Blue checks that I
Speaker 1: followed back in the day on Twitter really just responded
Speaker 1: by ceasing to use their account or just deleting it altogether.
Speaker 1: And in this first round of discourse, attacks on doctor
Speaker 1: Ali Luke's mainly came from this type of account, many
Speaker 1: of which are speculated to be bots, and their responses
Speaker 1: were amplified in the way that they couldn't have been
Speaker 1: during Daisy Miller's moment of virality with Coffee in the Garden.
Speaker 1: But the second round of engagement in these cases are
Speaker 1: the same. Once Ali's tweet had gotten enough engagement, there
Speaker 1: was an equally strong second round of discourse in support
Speaker 1: of her thesis on smell, with many accounts replying with
Speaker 1: encouragement and asking when her thesis would be available to read, which,
Speaker 1: if you're curious, is unfortunately available still nowhere at the
Speaker 1: time of this writing. But that didn't stop doctor Ali
Speaker 1: from wanting people to un understand where she was coming
Speaker 1: from while replying to as many people as she could,
Speaker 1: which is no small task or a relatively offline person
Speaker 1: who was suddenly exposed to millions of accounts. Ali replied
Speaker 1: to the original, now wildly viral post with clarification on
Speaker 1: what her thesis was actually about.
Speaker 3: She writes, to be clear, this apptect was written for
Speaker 3: experts within my discipline and field. It was not written
Speaker 3: for a lay audience, and this is not how I
Speaker 3: would communicate my ideas to the average person. Since there's
Speaker 3: some confusion about the nature of my research, here is
Speaker 3: the abstract from my PhD thesis, which I hope provide
Speaker 3: more contexts for anyone interested in learning about my work.
Speaker 1: She then posts, per abstract.
Speaker 3: This thesis studies how literature registers the importance of olfactory discourse,
Speaker 3: the language of smell and the olfactory imagination it creates
Speaker 3: and structuring our social world. The broad aim of this
Speaker 3: thesis is to offer an intersectional and wide ranging study
Speaker 3: of olfactory oppression by establishing the underlying logistics that facilitate
Speaker 3: Smell's application and creating subverting gender, class, sexual, racial, and
Speaker 3: species power structures. I focus largely on pros fiction from
Speaker 3: the modern contemporary periods so as to trace the legacy
Speaker 3: of olfactory prejudice in today and situate its contemporary relevance.
Speaker 1: It goes on from there. I've linked it in the description,
Speaker 1: and to be fair, this kind of paper is extremely
Speaker 1: my shit, and I'm so glad that doctor ally has
Speaker 1: cornered the market on talking about it. As I hope
Speaker 1: I've established at this point, I think there is tremendous
Speaker 1: value in seeing how something as both universal and understudied
Speaker 1: as smell, something almost everybody deals with, has been represented
Speaker 1: in the arts as a way of framing how we've
Speaker 1: interpreted our relationship to it over a course of centuries.
Speaker 1: But this would not be an opinion shared in a
Speaker 1: void of anti intellectualism. As the humanities continue to be
Speaker 1: de emphasized in the West, the idea that literary work
Speaker 1: could be anything but a pastime and not contain actual
Speaker 1: historical value or insight. Is not as commonly shared an
Speaker 1: opinion as it once was. But another aspect that I
Speaker 1: find interesting about how doctor Alli in twenty twenty four
Speaker 1: and Daisy Miller in twenty twenty two respond to this
Speaker 1: absolute torrential downpour of hate in the comments is how
Speaker 1: they respond as individuals, because, unlike Daisy, doctor Ali engages
Speaker 1: with her haters with a relatively and I think incredibly
Speaker 1: even keel for weeks. Here's an example of her thoughtfully
Speaker 1: engaging with an absolute shode as long as said chode
Speaker 1: was expressing a thought that wasn't just outright misogyny. The
Speaker 1: commenter writes.
Speaker 2: We need a new prefix for people with academic PhDs.
Speaker 2: Doctor should mean something.
Speaker 3: Doctor Ali replies, you know what, I don't disagree with this.
Speaker 3: I certainly won't be putting up my hand if someone
Speaker 3: asks is there a doctor in here on a plane.
Speaker 1: The amount of times that doctor Alli Luke's shows genuine
Speaker 1: patients with clearly bad faith commenters like this blew my
Speaker 1: mind and made me so glad that she's a teacher,
Speaker 1: because that kind of superhuman patience does not come easily
Speaker 1: and she clearly had some practice with it, but that
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that these bad faith comments and even threats
Speaker 1: didn't or couldn't affect her. It was a deeply stressful factor,
Speaker 1: and I think the most extreme example she's shared is
Speaker 1: this tweet about the fact that she needed to report
Speaker 1: a threat to the authorities on December one, twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1: Alie writes, to be.
Speaker 3: Clear, this is where I draw the line. This is
Speaker 3: abhorred and illegal, and no one should ever have to
Speaker 3: deal with this.
Speaker 1: Attached is a screenshot of an email she received on
Speaker 1: her academic email earlier that day, which reads and trigger warning.
Speaker 2: You are the dumbest fucking bitch I have ever seen
Speaker 2: on the Internet and the perfect example of literally everything
Speaker 2: wrong with modern society. Imagine thinking you deserve taxpayer money
Speaker 2: for writing up that useless piece of shit thesis nobody
Speaker 2: will ever read vegan, feminist, and queer. Your dues to
Speaker 2: society are many, and me and the boys will rape
Speaker 2: them out of you.
Speaker 1: When we read this. In our script meeting for this episode,
Speaker 1: our producer ian said that this was one of the
Speaker 1: worst screeds he'd heard directed to anyone online. Ever, I
Speaker 1: don't think you need me to remind you that this
Speaker 1: was in response to an unpublished paper about smell in books.
Speaker 1: There is no world where this is a rational response
Speaker 1: to anything, but it's egregious here. This was not in
Speaker 1: response to a hot take. Virtually all of the harassment
Speaker 1: doctor Ali was receiving was a result of violent projection
Speaker 1: on a platform where hate speech and threats are increasingly
Speaker 1: tolerated and inflammatory statements are boosted and even monetized. And
Speaker 1: all doctor Ali had done is commit the cardinal contemporary
Speaker 1: sin of being too woke. It's truly disgusting, and this
Speaker 1: is how a person who kept her personal life offline
Speaker 1: and posted almost never at all suddenly became an optimal
Speaker 1: target for gendered and homophobic harassment. To her attackers, Ali
Speaker 1: represented the exact kind of highly educated feminist intellectual that
Speaker 1: the right has delighted in threatening on social media and
Speaker 1: in real life at increasing rates for the last decade
Speaker 1: and then some. And while doctor Ali doesn't draw much
Speaker 1: attention to this in subsequent press appearances, this is just
Speaker 1: as good as time as any to discuss the state
Speaker 1: of online harassment, particularly because this story is such a
Speaker 1: recent one. Because in one sense, yes, the old chestnuts
Speaker 1: of online misogyny ring true here right. Being a woman online,
Speaker 1: being non white online, being trans online can and often
Speaker 1: is a fucking nightmare, particularly when you get pushed into
Speaker 1: the wrong side of the algorithm. But if you've also
Speaker 1: had the creeping feeling that this type of harassment has
Speaker 1: been getting worse in the last few years, you're far
Speaker 1: from alone, and you're probably right. In recent years, there
Speaker 1: has been a number of studies on how safe people
Speaker 1: and marginalized people specifically felt online after reports of online
Speaker 1: harassment had scaled up significantly. Sixteen percent of respondents told
Speaker 1: the Pew Research Center that they had been harassed online
Speaker 1: in twenty fourteen, a number that increased to twenty eight
Speaker 1: percent by twenty twenty one. These numbers then increased dramatically
Speaker 1: when narrowed to just speaking to women. The Worldwide Web
Speaker 1: Foundation's twenty twenty study said that over half of women
Speaker 1: and girl respondents had been harassed online before, and that
Speaker 1: eighty seven percent felt the problem was getting worse. This
Speaker 1: was before Elon bought Twitter, and this also scales up
Speaker 1: with a number of suicides among marginalized young people as
Speaker 1: a result of cyberbullying in that same timeframe. So why
Speaker 1: is it getting worse? To say that the world is
Speaker 1: full of idiot bigots is true, but too simple to
Speaker 1: be a full answer. It doesn't explain why, as time
Speaker 1: goes on we see people online being attacked over less
Speaker 1: and less. To say that that's because of Trump's reelection
Speaker 1: would also be to miss the forest for the trees,
Speaker 1: because yes, his being in power does endorse and even
Speaker 1: encourage more subjugation that is empowered by the government. But
Speaker 1: all of these numbers I just cited of increasing anxiety
Speaker 1: around online harassment were conducted during the Biden administration, as
Speaker 1: is the example of coffee in the garden with my husband. Okay,
Speaker 1: so maybe it's not entirely that. Like so many things
Speaker 1: about the contemporary Internet, I think a lot of this
Speaker 1: can be traced to algorithm driven timelines instead of the linear,
Speaker 1: personally curated ones that first made apps like Twitter, Facebook,
Speaker 1: and on and on so successful today, where the famously
Speaker 1: algorithm driven TikTok remains king among young users. This is
Speaker 1: true almost nowhere, meaning that as in both doctor Ali
Speaker 1: and Daisy's cases, their harassment was the result of an
Speaker 1: algorithm recognizing that pushing their post out to users who
Speaker 1: either genuinely hated women academia or both, or were willing
Speaker 1: to perform hating women and academia for cloud and personal
Speaker 1: profit and pushing their content there. It's a kind of
Speaker 1: harassment that wouldn't have been possible ten years ago, and
Speaker 1: one that makes the Internet a far less safe place
Speaker 1: for everyone while making it more profitable for very few.
Speaker 1: Are we sensing a familiar pattern here? No, Okay, my
Speaker 1: soapbox just collapsed beneath my feet, but be serious. What's
Speaker 1: happened here is that places like Twitter slash x have
Speaker 1: put a new, easy to use style of harassment in
Speaker 1: front of its worst users and literally monetized it. Doctor
Speaker 1: Ali Luke's getting messages like the one we read is
Speaker 1: completely horrifying and I hate how normal they've come to feel.
Speaker 1: And sure, reporting it is one of the very few
Speaker 1: options victims of this type of harassment have at their disposal,
Speaker 1: But like anything regarding threats of violence against women, police
Speaker 1: are his store and expectedly dog shit at dealing with them.
Speaker 1: Doctor Alli did discuss how this harassment affected her in
Speaker 1: a couple interviews. Again, in a moment that we come
Speaker 1: to see for all main characters, she had to decide
Speaker 1: whether she was going to let this story go away
Speaker 1: on its own by not engaging with it, or potentially
Speaker 1: extend the moment by participating, and she decides to go
Speaker 1: for it, but in a very specific way that still
Speaker 1: prioritizes her privacy. I think it's pretty cool. This is
Speaker 1: why it's nice to add in sounds on the podcast.
Speaker 1: I can tell you what's funny, and if you disagree,
Speaker 1: you hate women, she recently told Rolling Stone.
Speaker 3: I didn't know that this was going to get out
Speaker 3: of hand until probably forty eight hours in, when I
Speaker 3: started to see a couple of quite vicious comments. I thought,
Speaker 3: oh no, it's moving over to the wrong side of
Speaker 3: the platform, and so it did.
Speaker 1: So in the front facing media sense sense, doctor Allie
Speaker 1: sticks to her guns, never apologizing to any of the
Speaker 1: assholes who came after her, while still not sharing much
Speaker 1: about herself, as is her right. And this approach, she
Speaker 1: seems to quickly figure out, is a chance to make
Speaker 1: a very niche subject that she studies accessible to a
Speaker 1: suddenly captive and supportive audience. Because after the rounds of
Speaker 1: Twitter discourse died down and the blue checks moved on
Speaker 1: to harass the next person, Doctor Allie began posting regularly
Speaker 1: about smell in an attempt to answer good faith questions
Speaker 1: and share more about what she was actually studying, and
Speaker 1: her audience, presumably as under educated about smell as I
Speaker 1: was and still am, stayed and were really interested in
Speaker 1: what she had to say. Here are a few posts
Speaker 1: she made in the months that followed.
Speaker 3: I just know I'm going to be the talk of
Speaker 3: the English faculty this week. Hi all, I couldn't be
Speaker 3: more delighted that so many people pople have showed enthusiasm
Speaker 3: towards my work, and I'd love to share more with
Speaker 3: you as soon as I'm able, But right now my
Speaker 3: first priority is my students. But still term time here,
Speaker 3: and they deserve my time and attention in the context
Speaker 3: of my thesis. Yes, in order to understand how authors
Speaker 3: useful factory messaging, we must recognize that smells linked to
Speaker 3: different identity characteristics, for example, class race, in different ways,
Speaker 3: and that sometimes these characteristics overlap. Treating complexity.
Speaker 1: She began to do and is still doing, maybe the
Speaker 1: most subversive thing you could do on Twitter right now,
Speaker 1: something fucking useful, and it's worked. As of this writing,
Speaker 1: her online audience has grown to over two hundred thousand
Speaker 1: followers on Twitter, where she still bravely posts, ordinarily in
Speaker 1: response to stories people send her regarding Smell and how
Speaker 1: it's framed in contemporary media. By her account, the harassment
Speaker 1: died down as soon as the blue checks moved on
Speaker 1: to their next victim, very likely when the algorithm stopped
Speaker 1: piping out her content to people who hated it once
Speaker 1: it started to produce diminishing returns. And while absolutely nothing
Speaker 1: justifies the fear of receiving the kinds of threats that
Speaker 1: she did, Doctor Allie has decided to make lemonade. She's
Speaker 1: got literary agents and with any luck, a book on
Speaker 1: the way soon. Fingers crossed, and when we come back,
Speaker 1: doctor Ali Lukes tells us what the whole experience was
Speaker 1: like from her side of the keyboard. Welcome back to
Speaker 1: sixteenth minute. I got pretty burnt out in the middle
Speaker 1: of reading that book about Smell, and so I took
Speaker 1: a break to watch Scream six and this actor named
Speaker 1: Dermott mulroney is in it. And I know that he's
Speaker 1: a person who has been famous for a while, but
Speaker 1: I'm never not completely taken aback when I see the
Speaker 1: name Dermott mulroney. Like, your name is Dermott mulroney, I'm Dermott.
Speaker 1: No it's not. And here is my interview with the
Speaker 1: wonderful doctor Ali Lukex.
Speaker 6: I'm doctor Ali Lukex. I'm currently a supervisor in English
Speaker 6: Literature at the University of Cambridge and I work on smell.
Speaker 1: I've learned so much from you, but at what cost?
Speaker 1: And that's what we're here to discuss today. Were you
Speaker 1: always into olfactory studies? How did you get there?
Speaker 6: I was not always into ol factory studies. I arrived
Speaker 6: at olfactory studies during my undergrad degree. I did my
Speaker 6: undergraduate degree at the University of Exeter, which was fantastic.
Speaker 6: It gave me all of the things that I needed
Speaker 6: to get going.
Speaker 1: What were you studying at English Literature?
Speaker 6: So I did English literature undergrad English Issue in Modern
Speaker 6: Culture at UCL for my master's degree, and everyone called
Speaker 6: us the Issues students, which I felt was not very complementary.
Speaker 6: My work even at Exeter was relatively into disciplinary in
Speaker 6: that I was kind of given free reign to draw
Speaker 6: on philosophy and sociology.
Speaker 1: In my work.
Speaker 6: But my master's degree was really my kind of first
Speaker 6: forra and cultural studies. By the time I was in
Speaker 6: my second year of undergrad, I already had become infatuated
Speaker 6: with smell studies, although I didn't even really know that
Speaker 6: it was called smell studies back then.
Speaker 1: I just knew that.
Speaker 6: I had noticed this really interesting thing about literature, which
Speaker 6: was that in so many canonical texts, the texts that
Speaker 6: were just set on our reading lists, smell was a
Speaker 6: really fundamental part of how the authors were characterizing the
Speaker 6: figures in their books, both in positive and negative ways,
Speaker 6: that smell was used as a kind of political agent
Speaker 6: in those books.
Speaker 1: You know better than anyone, I feel like, probably the
Speaker 1: least examined sense, or at least considered sense, it's always
Speaker 1: the one that I say I would give up.
Speaker 6: And you're not alone. I very often, I very often
Speaker 6: do this thing with my students where I asked them
Speaker 6: to rank their senses according to their perceived value, and
Speaker 6: smell is like almost universally ranked at the bottom and
Speaker 6: sight at the top. And then we inevitably end up
Speaker 6: talking about smell because I can't stop talking about it,
Speaker 6: and then everyone else gets interested in it and they
Speaker 6: start reevaluating their biases.
Speaker 1: Taste suddenly found dead in a ditch. I mean, and
Speaker 1: so you, over the course of higher education, you become
Speaker 1: drawn to this very particular area of study. What existed
Speaker 1: around this area of study, I honestly have no idea.
Speaker 6: When I was an undergraduate, smell Studies really had not
Speaker 6: cohered into a stable field of study. I was drawing
Speaker 6: on simply what was out there and what I had
Speaker 6: access to, which was not everything. As it turned out,
Speaker 6: I only realized that I'd been missing out on some
Speaker 6: texts online when I got to Cambridge and suddenly had
Speaker 6: access to basically everything. The first Smell Studies academic article
Speaker 6: I found was this article called What's This Smell? By
Speaker 6: Hands Rendersbacker, and I thought that it was perhaps the
Speaker 6: most unique and interesting piece of criticism I'd ever read,
Speaker 6: And I think that was really what got me hooked.
Speaker 6: And it was kind of just freely available on academia
Speaker 6: dot edu, so that was great. I'm really a champion
Speaker 6: for free public access to resources. You know. I do
Speaker 6: feel that it's a shame that my thesis is embargoed,
Speaker 6: but it's also a necessity for now just to like
Speaker 6: protect my intellectual property until I can publish it. I'm
Speaker 6: really invested in making sure that academic work can be
Speaker 6: translated for public audiences and is available to public audiences.
Speaker 6: So I thought that it was really cool that he'd
Speaker 6: put it up on this public website for everyone to
Speaker 6: be able to access.
Speaker 1: What is your relationship with the internet like growing up
Speaker 1: and into college sort of alongside your journey towards smell studies.
Speaker 6: I have always been very bookish. Since I could read. Basically,
Speaker 6: I have been bookish. So I spend a lot more
Speaker 6: time reading than I do on the internet. Even now
Speaker 6: that i'm you know that I've been spending so much
Speaker 6: time on the internet, I still read more than I
Speaker 6: look at my social media. I was born ninety seven,
Speaker 6: so okay, I'm on the cusp of remembering a time
Speaker 6: before we had, you know, an enormous computer in the house.
Speaker 6: I was never really interested. I was just I would
Speaker 6: rather read books, Like I grew up with audio books.
Speaker 6: On the daily. You could find me painting or drawing
Speaker 6: whilst listening to an audiobook. That is how I wanted
Speaker 6: to spend my time, and it's how I still want
Speaker 6: to spend my time. Nothing has changed.
Speaker 1: How long did it take to write this thesis? What
Speaker 1: was the process of researching it because I really want
Speaker 1: to hit on what exactly this thesis is about, especially
Speaker 1: to emphasize how wildly, bizarrely out of context it's taken.
Speaker 6: Later for me, it took three and a half years.
Speaker 6: That's pretty typical, I think for a British PhD, most
Speaker 6: people take about four years. It's possible to get it
Speaker 6: done in three, but not many people do it. So
Speaker 6: I'm kind of smack bang in the middle of those
Speaker 6: two polls. I had already developed this base of knowledge
Speaker 6: and smell studies over kind of over years of studying
Speaker 6: it during my undergrad and my masters, but I was
Speaker 6: studying it in usually historical contexts, so I kind of
Speaker 6: purposefully left a gap the PhD where I would finally
Speaker 6: get to talk about modern and contemporary literature. It turned
Speaker 6: out that like hardly anyone was doing that work. Certainly
Speaker 6: no one was doing it in the way that I
Speaker 6: wanted to do it. So I really had free reign,
Speaker 6: which was great, so exciting. Honestly, welcome to my world.
Speaker 6: It has been the most amazing seven or eight years
Speaker 6: of studying this thing. Almost everything I say is a
Speaker 6: relatively new thing to people. It's so hard to happen
Speaker 6: upon that kind of thing in academia. So the process
Speaker 6: of writing the thesis, I knew the structure going into it.
Speaker 6: I knew that I wanted to structure it around identity
Speaker 6: categories because I had noticed in my reading Smell related
Speaker 6: to individual identity categories in quite distinct ways, but that
Speaker 6: all of those identity categories were related, and that there
Speaker 6: was this kind of collapsing and interesting overlaying of different
Speaker 6: social meanings that Smell could take on in relation to
Speaker 6: different identity categories. I wanted to write a thesis that
Speaker 6: really took each identity category seriously, but in which each
Speaker 6: of the chapters spoke to one another, and then I
Speaker 6: just read voraciously.
Speaker 1: So you complete your thesis? When do you complete your thesis?
Speaker 6: I completed my thesis in June twenty twenty four. I
Speaker 6: think some people feel very ambivalently towards their PhD thesis
Speaker 6: and the process of writing a PhD. I am very
Speaker 6: grateful that I never lost my enthusiasm for my subject
Speaker 6: or for the study of literature. I feel just as
Speaker 6: enthused as when I started, if not more actually, because
Speaker 6: the more you learn about smell, the more fascinating it is.
Speaker 1: Honestly, you have this beautiful, like bound version of your
Speaker 1: thesis and you log on to formerly Twitter dot com.
Speaker 1: How after when were you posting on this platform? What
Speaker 1: was your like standing relationship with this platform on the day.
Speaker 6: For a couple of years, I think a couple of
Speaker 6: years preceding the incident, I think I posted once every
Speaker 6: six months. I spent so little time on it that
Speaker 6: I had completely forgotten about the Musk takeover. I had
Speaker 6: no idea what it had become. It's never really been
Speaker 6: part of my personality. I don't think to be on
Speaker 6: social media very much, and I think Twitter is the same.
Speaker 6: It's the same story on Twitter. And the reason that
Speaker 6: I posted the photograph in the first place was because
Speaker 6: I kind of thought again, because I didn't realize that
Speaker 6: the platform had changed and people had left, mostly that
Speaker 6: my smell studies people and my literary studies people were
Speaker 6: still there and they might want to know that I'm
Speaker 6: done because they might have like potential post top projects
Speaker 6: that I could join. I did it for a reason.
Speaker 6: I didn't expect it to be met by an audience
Speaker 6: outside of the three hundred or so people that I
Speaker 6: followed on Twitter.
Speaker 1: Which is normal, but you're not in a normal place.
Speaker 1: So walk me through this day, this series of days,
Speaker 1: what pace did things start taking off? And how are
Speaker 1: you feeling as that's happening.
Speaker 6: So the post gained traction immediately, but initially it was
Speaker 6: among lots of kind people who were just offering their
Speaker 6: congratulations on my accomplishment. So that fact, even though I
Speaker 6: was uncomfortable about the attention, felt fine, right. But then
Speaker 6: after about forty eight hours, I would say, I started
Speaker 6: to notice some odd replies coming in, and then it
Speaker 6: was reposted by a couple of right wing accounts with
Speaker 6: big followings, and at that point the comments started to
Speaker 6: become extremely hostile, and those comments started gaining traction. So
Speaker 6: it wasn't just that it was the odd strange comment
Speaker 6: that you could kind of report and ignore these comments
Speaker 6: whilst it was bouncing around that hostile part of the platform.
Speaker 6: Those comments started shooting up to the top of the
Speaker 6: kind of comments. They were gaining the most likes and
Speaker 6: completely They weren't by any means outweighing all of the
Speaker 6: positive congratulatory comments, but they were the first that anyone
Speaker 6: would see when they looked at the post because they
Speaker 6: had the most.
Speaker 1: Likes, prior to if you could remember the massive amplification
Speaker 1: through the right wing accounts, what were the weirder responses
Speaker 1: you were getting and what were proportionally positive to negative
Speaker 1: before these big accounts latched onto it.
Speaker 6: I do think that it was such a whirlwind that,
Speaker 6: even though in general I have quite a good memory
Speaker 6: from my own experiences, I would struggle the most outlandish
Speaker 6: comments coming in, you know, the kind of the really
Speaker 6: long ones where someone's basically written an essay. And there
Speaker 6: was one where someone was like, your ancestors were fighting
Speaker 6: mountain lions and you are disgracing them. I was like,
Speaker 6: where do you Who.
Speaker 1: Do you think I am? And where do you think
Speaker 1: I live?
Speaker 6: As British as it.
Speaker 1: Gets, Yeah, that is I found a pretty common anti
Speaker 1: intellectual reply to almost anything. It's like your ancestors did
Speaker 1: something that matters and I hate you, and it's like, well,
Speaker 1: what are you doing? How did you manage that? And
Speaker 1: how did it translate to your normal life?
Speaker 6: Yeah, it was pretty all consuming for the first week,
Speaker 6: if not longer. The replies were coming in way faster
Speaker 6: than I could read them, which was stressful because I
Speaker 6: like to have the full picture, so I was not
Speaker 6: sleeping in an attempt to keep up with the conversation.
Speaker 6: I probably got about three hours of sleep every night
Speaker 6: for about nine days, constantly refreshing the other thing is.
Speaker 6: And this really reveals how kind of illiterate I am
Speaker 6: on that platform. I didn't realize that you could check
Speaker 6: quote tweets, so I would stumble upon quote tweets of
Speaker 6: that original tweet with like millions and millions of impressions.
Speaker 6: Even as I thought I was doing quite a good
Speaker 6: job of keeping up with the replies, I was still
Speaker 6: missing them thousands and thousands of quote tweets. It wasn't
Speaker 6: that I was losing. It wasn't like it was keeping
Speaker 6: me up at night. I think mentally, I was really
Speaker 6: unscathed by this. I'm quite a difficult person to phase.
Speaker 6: Partly that's because the critiques were so ludicrous in so
Speaker 6: many instances, and there was some valid skepticism. Don't get
Speaker 6: me wrong. I don't expect everyone to read the title
Speaker 6: The Politics of Smell and think, oh, yeah, of course,
Speaker 6: that's a really useful thing that we need in society.
Speaker 6: But I felt confident that provided I was given the
Speaker 6: time and space, I would be able to win over
Speaker 6: at least some of the people who were skeptical about
Speaker 6: the value of the thesis. I didn't worry about critiques
Speaker 6: of my work because you know, ultimately they only had
Speaker 6: the title of my thesis and the abstract, which was
Speaker 6: written and intended for an academic audience, and so I
Speaker 6: understood why some people were saying that it was kind
Speaker 6: of obfuscating or it was inaccessible. I think that's a
Speaker 6: fair critique of an academic abstract, almost any academic abstract,
Speaker 6: and it's not the way that I would convey my
Speaker 6: ideas to a general public. So nobody really had anything
Speaker 6: else to say about the work. The work, you know what.
Speaker 6: They were making assumptions about the work, but those assumptions
Speaker 6: were false.
Speaker 1: So we'll be right back with more from doctor Alli.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to sixteenth Minute. I bring lost an AMBI
Speaker 1: podcast Award in Chicago last night. But the good news
Speaker 1: is that I lost to a great show. I've been
Speaker 1: listening to it all today. It's called Inheriting from LAist
Speaker 1: and I think you'll really like it. It's linked in
Speaker 1: the description and if you still respect my loser ass
Speaker 1: here's the rest of my interview with doctor Ali Lukes.
Speaker 1: You engaged with people, even if they were, you know,
Speaker 1: very clearly willfully misinterpreting what you're saying. You replied to
Speaker 1: a lot of people thoughtfully and patiently. What motivated you
Speaker 1: to do that?
Speaker 6: I think fundamentally, I have no interest in arguing with
Speaker 6: people on the internet. It's not a good use of
Speaker 6: my time. Did, however, always intend to share my work
Speaker 6: with a public audience. I always wanted to write a
Speaker 6: trade book. I always wanted to disseminate my ideas in
Speaker 6: a way that would be accessible to people, and I
Speaker 6: had been given an opportunity to do that in an
Speaker 6: unconventional way. Sure, but it was nevertheless an opportunity to
Speaker 6: reach people and to kind of cut my teeth in
Speaker 6: the world of public discourse. Because I do think there's
Speaker 6: something to be said about the insulation of academia, the
Speaker 6: way that you know, we all talk to each other
Speaker 6: and we're all kind of interested in our in our
Speaker 6: own niche little aspects of whatever it is that we're
Speaker 6: working on. It is easy, I think, in academia to
Speaker 6: feel slightly separated from the real world in a way
Speaker 6: that is I think distinct from the criticism of academia
Speaker 6: that we're all kind of in ivory towers, and that
Speaker 6: we don't have any understanding of the real world in
Speaker 6: terms of privilege. I think it's not sensible to make
Speaker 6: assumptions about people online whether they're in academia or not.
Speaker 6: We still have a long ways to go in terms
Speaker 6: of making academia equitable, in making sure that you know
Speaker 6: everybody has access to those resources. But it's not possible
Speaker 6: to tell based on a picture of someone right what
Speaker 6: their background is. My friends have told me since the
Speaker 6: dawn of time that I'm quite a naive person and
Speaker 6: that I'm probably too earnest for my own good, and
Speaker 6: I think I probably bring that to my social media
Speaker 6: presence because I don't know how else to be. I've
Speaker 6: experienced people coming in with hostility or writing something that
Speaker 6: is clearly quite combative, and provided you don't kind of
Speaker 6: stoop to their level, sometimes people will turn around. I
Speaker 6: think the problem is online we forget that people are
Speaker 6: real people. I think when I engage with people online,
Speaker 6: I assume that everyone that I'm talking to is a
Speaker 6: real person, probably even when they're a bot. The post
Speaker 6: went viral towards the end of term, so I think
Speaker 6: I had a out a week of teaching left before
Speaker 6: the end of term. Most of my students mentioned it.
Speaker 6: But honestly, that generation, they're implacable. They are so difficult
Speaker 6: to phase. They were just like, oh, I saw that
Speaker 6: you were on BBC News. What's that about? Yeah, And
Speaker 6: a couple of them, a couple of them were, you know,
Speaker 6: really worried. And one of them brought me a plant,
Speaker 6: which is over there on my desk. Oh, that's so sweet,
Speaker 6: and it was yeah. I mean, I love my students.
Speaker 6: I think they're wonderful, but they they truly do not care.
Speaker 6: They don't care at all about my personal life or
Speaker 6: what I'm doing outside of teaching them. And that's great.
Speaker 6: I love that.
Speaker 1: Were you happy with the way that your story was
Speaker 1: being framed in the media? How were you wanting to engage?
Speaker 6: This was probably the most chaotic period of my entire life,
Speaker 6: the sort of three or four days once the media
Speaker 6: had caught wind of it and everybody wanted to have
Speaker 6: an interview, everybody wanted to comment, and trying to sift
Speaker 6: through like hundreds of emails every day. I was happy
Speaker 6: with the way that the media decided to report on this.
Speaker 6: The first British publication to report on it was the
Speaker 6: Daily Mail. And the Daily Mail they're known for being
Speaker 6: quite right wing. Their assessment of the situation was remarkably charitable.
Speaker 6: That they've done a couple of articles now and they've
Speaker 6: they've been really kind of glowing, and I'm still unsure
Speaker 6: as to how I've pulled that off.
Speaker 1: Did you feel pressure to be more online after this happened?
Speaker 6: I did feel pressure, but I also resisted the pressure.
Speaker 6: So I decided that I would only do it as
Speaker 6: long as I was having fun and as long as
Speaker 6: people were feeding back that they were learning something. I
Speaker 6: didn't want it. I didn't want it to just become
Speaker 6: like a running joke. I wanted it actually to be
Speaker 6: at least to some degree educational, because I think that's important.
Speaker 6: I also, you know, didn't want to let it kind
Speaker 6: of overshadow the things that I really want to invest
Speaker 6: my time in, which is teaching my students and writing.
Speaker 6: I think I've found a nice balance. I don't spend
Speaker 6: very much time on there at all.
Speaker 1: What would you like to do with this new audience,
Speaker 1: I mean, what would you like to sort of do
Speaker 1: moving forward? I am like I would love to read
Speaker 1: a book about smell theory from you. Oh well, I'm.
Speaker 6: Very pleased to hear that this is what it's all
Speaker 6: been leading up to for me, because although I really
Speaker 6: enjoy explaining smell stuff to people on Twitter in a
Speaker 6: limited amount of characters, it's quite good for me actually
Speaker 6: to practice being really concise. I am a writer, and
Speaker 6: I do think that my ideas are probably best conveyed
Speaker 6: in the form of like long form prose. So I
Speaker 6: think if people are interested in the ideas, then they're
Speaker 6: going to love the trade book.
Speaker 1: But now that there's sort of massive unexpected thing has happened. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what is your takeaway? Ben From having survived the main
Speaker 1: character experience and been able to return to your normal life, I.
Speaker 6: Have not returned to my normal life.
Speaker 1: Okay, say more about that.
Speaker 6: I that my normal life has been and gone, but
Speaker 6: not in a bad way. Not in a bad way,
Speaker 6: I mean, in many ways, this experience hasn't changed me.
Speaker 6: It hasn't changed my personality, It hasn't changed my perspective.
Speaker 6: It hasn't changed my perspective on the work or on
Speaker 6: what I want to do with it. It has slightly
Speaker 6: changed my perspective on some people who are wild. I
Speaker 6: didn't know that it was. I think I truly, I mean,
Speaker 6: I guess intellectually, I knew that it was possible for
Speaker 6: people to be so hostile and so combative towards something
Speaker 6: they don't understand. But it's a different thing knowing something
Speaker 6: is possible and experiencing it yourself. I do think, though,
Speaker 6: that perhaps some of that has to do with the
Speaker 6: fact that almost all of us have a sense of smell,
Speaker 6: and almost all of us have a whole lifetime of
Speaker 6: experiences to draw on when we're talking about smell, and
Speaker 6: so we all kind of feel like we're experts in
Speaker 6: our own experience of smell. I can see why people
Speaker 6: feel maybe concerned about the idea that their sense of
Speaker 6: smell could be doing something that they're not aware of.
Speaker 6: I think I think that's maybe a little it's suspicious,
Speaker 6: and I can see why people would be worried about it.
Speaker 6: I don't I don't really see why people would react
Speaker 6: with quite the amount of vitriol that they did. But
Speaker 6: then again, I'm I'm not them, and I'm kind of
Speaker 6: happy with I'm certainly happy with that. I'm happy to
Speaker 6: accept that a whole variety of people exist in the world,
Speaker 6: and that has nothing to do with me or my work.
Speaker 1: What is next for this field of study? What would
Speaker 1: you like to see happen moving forward?
Speaker 6: Oh, this is I mean, this is a personal bias
Speaker 6: because this is what I want to do next. Please, yeah,
Speaker 6: because I want to do it. That is That is
Speaker 6: how I feel. I mean, I mean, I'm already in
Speaker 6: the process of this. I'm developing a post doctoral project
Speaker 6: that would study the effects of smell disorders. I think
Speaker 6: this is like you know post well, we say post COVID,
Speaker 6: but that is a really contentious thing, especially in the
Speaker 6: US in comparison to the UK. But it's estimated that
Speaker 6: something like twenty seven million people still have long lasting
Speaker 6: damage to their sense of smell and their sense of
Speaker 6: taste because the sense of smell is up to ninety
Speaker 6: five percent. Well, it's flavor taste is separable. I'm going
Speaker 6: to get into a whole thing. It doesn't even matter.
Speaker 1: Really, don't get her start it, don't give her startled.
Speaker 6: But there are globally so many people have been affected
Speaker 6: by smell disorders, and they are dramatically understudied. But the
Speaker 6: studies that we do have show that depression, anxiety, suicidality,
Speaker 6: weight loss, all of these things come in the wake
Speaker 6: of losing sense of smell. So I think a project
Speaker 6: that studies the effects of smell disorders would really help
Speaker 6: to completely re evaluate the way that we think about
Speaker 6: smell and the way it contributes to our lives and
Speaker 6: our well being. Actually, so that's something that I hope
Speaker 6: is cooking. The other reason that studying smell disorders is
Speaker 6: really important is because evidence, recent evidence starting in about
Speaker 6: twenty twenty three, suggests that we're all losing our sense
Speaker 6: of smell, that the effects of pollution are causing us
Speaker 6: all to have a diminished sense of smell, and that
Speaker 6: is disproportionately affecting people from low income backgrounds and racialized communities,
Speaker 6: because those are the kinds of people who typically are
Speaker 6: situated around heavily polluting industrial where houses because they're cheap.
Speaker 6: Those houses are cheap, and that is a serious problem.
Speaker 6: It's a serious problem that really is own we're only
Speaker 6: just starting to talk about in the smell studies community,
Speaker 6: let alone in the kind of broader public discourse.
Speaker 1: And I'm sure people have asked you this before. What
Speaker 1: is your favorite smell? What is the best smell to you?
Speaker 6: My go to answer now because people have asked me
Speaker 6: this and I've been.
Speaker 1: I don't have to imagine.
Speaker 6: Yeah, is fresh garden sage like garden sage when you
Speaker 6: like tear up a leaf that smell is my favorite.
Speaker 1: Wow, you're literally out there touching grass, doing the thing
Speaker 1: that everyone's telling each other to do in the internet.
Speaker 6: I am obsessed with smell. There's this It's on. It's
Speaker 6: indubitable that I am obsessed with smell. I can't imagine
Speaker 6: that obsession waning, actually, partly because there's so much work
Speaker 6: to be done. Yeah, and it has been like notoriously
Speaker 6: difficult to get funding to do work on smell because
Speaker 6: it's not valued. And now that the tables are turning
Speaker 6: slightly and we're seeing more interest in sensory studies broadly
Speaker 6: in the academy, I do think that we're just going
Speaker 6: to keep seeing more and more interesting work about smell. So,
Speaker 6: you know, I would love to keep talking about smell,
Speaker 6: commentating on smell, bringing that work to public audiences. But
Speaker 6: I also think that there's work to be done in
Speaker 6: just advocating for and championing the value of the humanities
Speaker 6: and trying to get away from this idea that the
Speaker 6: humanities and the sciences are in competition, because I think
Speaker 6: my work certainly suggests that literally studies specifically, it's kind
Speaker 6: of open to reinvention in the process of new interdisciplinary
Speaker 6: encounters that I would I would love to be a
Speaker 6: small part of the story of trying to make the
Speaker 6: humanities cool again. I'm so grateful for my audience of
Speaker 6: people who are curious and interested in learning about things
Speaker 6: that they might not have encountered before. I don't think
Speaker 6: that people actually think the humanities are uncool. I mean
Speaker 6: some people do. I don't think that it's this kind
Speaker 6: of like received understanding of the value of the humanities.
Speaker 6: I don't think it's that pervasive in the US. I'm
Speaker 6: sure it's this. It's it's the same as in the UK.
Speaker 6: People are increasingly worried that they're not going to be
Speaker 6: able to get a job that will give them a
Speaker 6: life that is livable, and there's this kind of fear
Speaker 6: mongering surround surrounding the humanities that suggests that if people
Speaker 6: pursue degrees in the humanities, then that's not going to
Speaker 6: offer them employability at the end of it. And I
Speaker 6: actually think that that's statistically not true. I've looked at
Speaker 6: some of the reports about employability and it turns out
Speaker 6: that certainly in many sectors, English is more employable than
Speaker 6: something like physics. The way that we talk about things
Speaker 6: online really really matters. It can seriously obscure the reality
Speaker 6: of a situation. We kind of need people who are
Speaker 6: willing to go to bat for the humanities when they're
Speaker 6: in this kind of pressure cooker situation of being defunded
Speaker 6: and push to one side people who just simply don't
Speaker 6: understand the value of them control the conversation, and that
Speaker 6: in some ways does more damage than anything else because
Speaker 6: it puts people off. It puts people off even trying
Speaker 6: right right, You have teenagers thinking, oh, well, I absolutely
Speaker 6: love literature, but I don't think I can go and
Speaker 6: study it because you know, what's the point at the
Speaker 6: end of it, How is it going to get me
Speaker 6: a job? And I I like, realistically, I don't think
Speaker 6: that's a problem any more than it is for certain
Speaker 6: other disciplines that are outside of the humanities. And it's
Speaker 6: just stopping people from engaging in what they really would
Speaker 6: love to do, and that's problematic.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for making time for this. I
Speaker 1: really appreciate it.
Speaker 6: It's an absolute pleasure. Thank you for asking me.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much to doctor Ali Lukes, who you can
Speaker 1: follow at the links in the description for when she
Speaker 1: has time to share her brilliance with you. I am
Speaker 1: so inspired by Ali's even headedness and commitment to her
Speaker 1: line of study, in particular her care in noting that
Speaker 1: a diminished sense of smell due to long COVID could
Speaker 1: stand to hurt a lot of people down the line,
Speaker 1: particularly those who live in frontline climate communities. I don't
Speaker 1: know about you, but that had certainly not occurred to me,
Speaker 1: but it makes a lot of sense. And as with
Speaker 1: so many marginalized people doing important, undervalued work, it is
Speaker 1: so frustrating that academics like Ali Luke's are always the
Speaker 1: first to absorb this absurd amount of vitriol from the
Speaker 1: worst faith people on the planet with Internet connections, and so,
Speaker 1: dear listener, I am hanging in for a book from Ali.
Speaker 1: I have a good feeling because whether those chodes on
Speaker 1: X believe it or not work like hers can really
Speaker 1: make a huge difference. Doctor Ali Lukes, Your sixteenth minute
Speaker 1: ends now.
Speaker 7: Sixteenth Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and
Speaker 7: iHeart Radio. It is written, hosted, and produced by me
Speaker 7: Jamie Loftus. Our executive producers are Sophia Lechterman and Robert Evans.
Speaker 7: The amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor.
Speaker 1: Our theme song is by Sad thirteen. Voice acting is
Speaker 1: from Brandt Crater and pet shout outs to our dog
Speaker 1: producer Anderson, my kat's flea Casper, and my pet rock Bird,
Speaker 1: who will outlive us all Bye.