What's in store for the music, TV, and film industries for 2025? We don't know, but we're making some fun, bold predictions for the new year. Listen now to the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast from NPR.

Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident.

Our show today starts with a story of viral outrage.

In November, an academic named Allie Lukes posted a photo of herself on X, holding her thesis.

After years of work, she was celebrating finishing her PhD at Cambridge University.

My thesis is titled, Olfactory Eth the politics of smell in modern and contemporary prose.

So I look at why certain authors of the past century use smell to indicate social hostilities,

and I connect these literary examples with the real world understanding of smell and how we

think about smell in society.

Allie thought she'd get a couple congrats comments and go on with her life.

That's not what happened.

It didn't even occur to me, actually, that it could blow up in a negative way. After it was

retweeted by a couple of right-wing accounts who had kind of mocked the idea of my thesis,

and actually the fact that I was doing a PhD in English literature.

To make it clear, just the title alone of her thesis, which you could see in the picture

she posted, was enough to make it go super viral.

It now has over 126 million views.

I'm sorry to say I was on X the day that this went viral and let me tell you.

That comment section was rough. Here's a taste of it.

Ten years of childbearing youth that she will never regain.

A liberal arts education is worth nothing.

Academia is a disaster. We should be teaching math, science, not this nonsense. Make education great again.

...