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ELI5 / TLDR

A Cambridge academic posted a photo of her finished PhD thesis — about how writers use smell to signal social prejudice — and the internet tore her apart. The post got 126 million views, most of them hostile. The host of this NPR show uses that pile-on as a doorway into a bigger pattern: a growing distrust of educated people, experts, and especially the humanities. Two academics argue this isn’t random mockery — it’s a political tactic, and the humanities are a target precisely because they teach people to question who’s in charge.

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The thesis that broke the internet

In November, Dr. Ally Lukes finished her PhD at Cambridge. Her topic was what she calls the politics of smell — why certain twentieth-century authors use descriptions of smell to mark some people as lesser, and what that reveals about how society quietly uses smell to sort people. She posted a celebratory photo holding the thesis, expecting a few “congrats” replies.

Instead, a couple of right-wing accounts mocked it, and the post exploded to over 126 million views. The comment section was brutal — sneering at her years of study, at women in academia, at the very idea of studying English literature.

A liberal arts education is worth nothing. Academia is a disaster. We should be teaching math, science, not this nonsense.

The host, Britney Loose, saw several cultural currents crashing together in that one thread: misogyny, anti-woke sentiment, and demands to defund the humanities. Underneath all of it she saw one thing — anti-intellectualism, meaning hostility and distrust toward experts and education. She cites a researcher who found that one in three Americans holds anti-intellectual views.

Why smell, of all things

Here is the part worth slowing down for. Yale philosopher Jason Stanley points out that the attack landed on exactly the kind of work that helps explain the attackers themselves. Much of far-right politics runs on disgust — casting certain groups as dirty, contaminating, repulsive. And smell is one of the main triggers of disgust. So a scholar studying how smell gets weaponized is, in effect, studying the machinery of the politics attacking her.

Lukes makes a sharp distinction here. Think of the “ick” you get on a bad date — that instant recoil. It feels like danger, but it usually isn’t.

There’s a very real and distinct difference between harm and discomfort.

A smell can be unpleasant without being a threat. The trick of prejudice, she argues, is to take ordinary discomfort and dress it up as fear — to make “this person smells different” feel like “this person is dangerous.” Disgust borrows the alarm bells of real danger and rings them when there’s nothing to be afraid of.

Anti-intellectualism as a strategy, not a mood

Stanley frames the broader hostility as deliberate. Universities are where people are trained to question the status quo — to look at how things are and ask whether they should be that way. If you can paint that questioning as decadent or deviant, you defang it. Then any challenge to the existing order looks like elite nonsense rather than legitimate inquiry.

He concedes the critique has a real kernel. Access to good education in America tracks closely with money, so being knowledgeable gets tangled up with being part of the elite.

If you can connect these institutions to a kind of repugnant elitism, which they are connected to, let’s be frank, then you can marshall a populist movement against learning.

But he calls the picture of academics as a pampered class a fiction — landing a permanent professorship is brutally hard and badly paid. And he notes the irony that the loudest “populist” voices attacking universities — he names politicians with degrees from Yale, Harvard, Princeton — are themselves products of those same institutions. They run the anti-university line because it works politically, not because they believe it.

What the humanities are actually for

Asked why the humanities matter when only about 12% of US students now graduate in them, both guests give the same answer: democracy needs them. Self-government means ordinary citizens helping shape the laws they live under, and that requires knowing history, different social systems, and the perspectives of people unlike you.

Stanley reaches for an old American argument — the debate between Booker T. Washington, who said freedom for Black Americans was mainly economic (just make money), and W.E.B. Du Bois, who insisted everyone needed a free liberal education because democratic citizenship demands it. The same fight, he says, is happening now.

His core claim:

The humanities allows you to talk about anything, and that’s a threat.

In authoritarian countries you cannot stand up and criticize the rulers. A field of study whose whole point is that you can examine anything — including the nation’s own greatness — is dangerous to anyone who wants certain things left unquestioned.

Lukes closes on the part she found most rewarding. Strangers started using her ideas on their own — applying “the politics of smell” to their own lives and cultures without even tagging her. The pile-on meant to bury her work ended up handing it the public audience she’d always wanted.

Key Takeaways

A PhD thesis on the “politics of smell” went viral with 126 million mostly-hostile views, becoming a case study in online anti-intellectualism.
Anti-intellectualism is defined as hostility and mistrust toward academics, experts, and education; cited research puts roughly one in three Americans in that camp.
Far-right politics often runs on disgust, and smell is a primary trigger of disgust — so studying smell-based prejudice is studying that political machinery directly.
Disgust works by converting mere discomfort into fear; a bad smell is uncomfortable but not harmful, yet prejudice treats it as a danger signal.
Attacking universities is framed as a strategy: discredit the place that teaches people to question authority, and you make questioning authority itself look deviant.
The “academics are pampered elites” image is called a fiction — tenure-track jobs are scarce and poorly paid — and many loud anti-university voices are themselves Ivy League graduates.
The Washington vs. Du Bois debate (economic freedom alone vs. liberal education for all) is the historical template for today’s fight over the humanities.
The pitch for the humanities is civic: democracy requires citizens who understand history, social systems, and perspectives other than their own.

Claude’s Take

This is a clip show — NPR repackaging an earlier interview during a slow week — and it wears its politics openly, so calibrate accordingly. It is firmly anti-MAGA and pro-academia, and it doesn’t pretend otherwise. That’s fine as long as you read it as advocacy, not neutral analysis.

The strongest idea, and the one that survives outside the culture-war frame, is the disgust mechanism: the harm-versus-discomfort distinction is a genuinely useful tool for noticing when your gut is impersonating your judgment. That alone is worth the listen.

The weakest move is the slide from “internet trolls mocked a thesis” to “this proves a coordinated authoritarian assault on knowledge.” Both things can be real, but the episode treats the connection as obvious when it’s doing a lot of inferential work. And there’s an unexamined tension the show never resolves: it admits universities are genuinely entangled with “repugnant elitism,” then spends the rest of the time defending them without grappling with how that elitism feeds the backlash. The honest version of this conversation sits in that discomfort longer. Six out of ten — one sharp, portable idea wrapped in a lot of preaching to the choir.