Smithsonian Magazine Achieves Peak Idiocy

The year’s worst article about smell?

Dumb articles about smell appear like clockwork. There are stories about perfume trends (gourmands, oud, dupes, repeat), smell and memory (Proust until you puke), and the link between smell and emotion (olfactory bulb, amygdala, hip bone connected to the thigh bone). These pieces are seldom worth reading, much less getting worked up about.

But sometimes out of left field comes an article so incandescently stupid that it can’t be ignored. A contender for Worst Smell Story of the Year. An agenda-driven piece so bereft of facts and argument that you can only shake your head in wonder.

Behold the latest from Smithsonian Magazine:

“Earth’s Smells Are Disappearing Because of Climate Change, and It’s a Vast Cultural Loss”

Oh, noooooooooo!

This piece by free-lance writer and recent college grad Serena Jampel fuses two hackneyed journalistic traditions—climate hysteria and blathering about smell—into a single noxious amalgam that any self-respecting editor would have spiked. If there was ever a reason to deploy a kill fee, this was it. But Smithsonian is fully committed to the climate cause and besides, Jampel quotes multiple Smell Experts, so it must be legit, right? Right?

Jampel breathlessly claims that “some scents might soon become extinct.” OMG. Are we talking about rose? sage? patchouli? She doesn’t say. Nor does she provide a timeline for these extinction events. The susceptible reader will hyperventilate and conjure up his own worst nightmares. The panic-resistant reader will notice that Jampel cites not a single study to deliver the particulars. Data? She don’t need no stinkin’ data.

Here’s another banger: “Whether or not we pay attention to the world’s ‘scentscape,’ heat and pollution are causing it to shift.” Hang on there. You mean we might miss it if we don’t pay attention? Then how does it qualify as a “vast cultural loss”? And notice how casually she slid pollution into the mix. Very smooth. Jampel knows she can’t deliver the smell apocalypse based on global warming alone, so she summons up another bogeyman.

One of Jampel’s Smell Experts (not a biologist but “a researcher in architecture and sensory environments”) conveniently notes that “cooking fumes from restaurants and rotting trash contribute disruptive smells that can affect wildlife.” [I knew it! That Burger King in Wellington, Colorado is crippling antelope herds out on the eastern plains.—Ed.] [Settle down, Beavis. You’re taking the bait.]

Rachel Herz, another of Jampel’s obliging Smell Experts, notes that “increased pollution, increased ozone, et cetera, actually is causing damage to the peripheral olfactory system and our ability to smell,” thereby conflating disappearing smells with a disappearing sense of smell. Then Jampel reminds us that COVID-19 caused widespread anosmia. Global warming! Pollution! Epidemics! Sensory deprivation! The four horsemen of the Olfactopocalypse are bearing down on us.

Jampel lards her piece with human interest sob stories culturally relevant insights about Yoruba scent traditions and indigenous communities in Amazonia, but in the end all she has produced is a gigantic, content-free pile of attitudinizing. Her Smithsonian piece is a waste of your time. Yet I have no doubt it serve its author well in the short time the declining legacy media has left to pay freelancers for fluff like this.

P.S. Am I being too hard on the climate-obsessed media? You be the judge.