The price you pay for being smart.
It's Been a Minute
NPR
4.6 • 8.8K Ratings
🗓️ 14 July 2025
⏱️ 15 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
According to two intellectuals, Dr. Ally Louks and Jason Stanley, the humanities help us better connect to other humans. According to a lot of online haters, they're worthless. In November 2024, Dr. Louks recently posted her Cambridge University dissertation online and was piled on by a loud group of right-wing anti-intellectuals.
Today, Brittany revisits her convo with Dr. Louks, and Jason Stanley, a professor of Philosophy at Yale University. They investigate the backlash to Dr. Louks, higher education at large, and why "anti-intellectualism" is prevalent in Republican politics. For more, read Jason Stanley's book Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future.
This episode originally published January 27, 2025.
Support public media and receive ad-free listening & bonus. Join NPR+ today.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Support for NPR and the following message come from the Limelson Foundation, working to harness the power of invention and innovation to accelerate climate action and improve lives around the world. |
| 0:11.7 | Learn more at Limelson.org. |
| 0:16.8 | Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about |
| 0:22.8 | what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. |
| 0:33.6 | Our show today starts with a story of viral outrage. |
| 0:39.0 | In November, an academic named Allie Lukes posted a photo of herself on X, holding her thesis. |
| 0:45.7 | After years of work, she was celebrating finishing her PhD at Cambridge University. |
| 0:50.4 | My thesis is titled, Olfactory Eth the politics of smell in modern and contemporary prose. |
| 0:57.9 | So I look at why certain authors of the past century use smell to indicate social hostilities, |
| 1:07.5 | and I connect these literary examples with the real world understanding of smell and how we |
| 1:15.1 | think about smell in society. Allie thought she'd get a couple congrats comments and go on with her |
| 1:21.2 | life. That's not what happened. It didn't even occur to me actually actually, that it could blow up in a negative way. |
| 1:29.3 | After it was retweeted by a couple of right-wing accounts who had kind of mocked the idea of my thesis, |
| 1:36.9 | and actually the fact that I was doing a PhD in English literature. |
| 1:45.0 | To make it clear, just the title alone of her thesis, |
| 1:49.0 | which you could see in the picture she posted, |
| 1:51.0 | was enough to make it go super viral. |
| 1:54.0 | It now has over 126 million views. |
| 1:58.3 | I'm sorry to say I was on X the day that this went viral and let me tell you. |
| 2:03.1 | That comment section was rough. Here's a taste of it. |
| 2:07.4 | Ten years of childbearing youth that she will never regain. A liberal arts education is worth |
| 2:12.8 | nothing. Academia is a disaster. We should be teaching math, science, not this nonsense. Make education great again. |
... |
Transcript will be available on the free plan in 24 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from NPR, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of NPR and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.