Nautilus Magazine: What Did the Past Smell Like?

That’s a question with which the minds behind “Odeuropa” will have to grapple. Launching this January, it is a $3.3 million, three-year, multinational project on the collection and recreation of smells in 16th- to early 20th-century Europe that will marry historical and literary analysis with machine learning and chemistry. The project is pioneering and also, in a year of COVID-19 induced anosmia with sensory-deprived lockdowns, timely.2 We became aware of our need for environmental stimulation—and the undervalued power of smell. [...]

Descriptions of odor also are culturally mediated. A 2016 study showed that even French and Franco-Canadians today may not agree in their experience and evaluation of the same odor3: For the French, for example, wintergreen was rated much less pleasantly than for French-Canadians. “In France, wintergreen is used more in medicinal products than in Canada, where it is found more in candy,” a press release for the study stated. “Anise was rated similarly in two cultures but was described more often as ‘licorice’ in Quebec and as ‘anise’ in France.” Intricate cross-cultural differences make for intriguing anecdotes. But they are hard to document. [...]

Odeuropa opens up a new sensory experience of history. The researchers will create a catalog of past scents by digging through 250,000 images and thousands of texts (in seven languages), ranging from medical descriptions of smells in textbooks to labels of fragrances in novels or magazines. Machine learning will help to cross-analyze the plethora of descriptions, contexts, and occurrence of odor names (such as tobacco, lavender, and probably horse manure). This catalog serves as the conceptual basis for perfumers and chemists to create fragrant molecules fitting 120 of these descriptors. [...]

Part of the Odeuropa team is a research project called Smell of Heritage, carried out by Cecilia Bembibre, a doctoral student in heritage science at University College London. Heritage scientists look to come up with new ways to study materials and collections that make up cultural heritage, as well as how the environment interacts with it. Bembibre, for example, analyzes and archives culturally essential aromas. “In the heritage context,” the Smell of Heritage website states, “experiencing what the world smelled like in the past enriches our knowledge of it, and, because of the unique relation between odors and memories, allows us to engage with our history in a more emotional way.” [...]

The historical conservation of smell visualizes (for lack of a better term) our need to directly experience and engage with the changes in our history’s materiality. In a world accelerating the digitization of knowledge and the virtual documentation of other people’s lives, we should not forget about our desire to sensually experience. It’s vital, for me at least. Things like virtual reality, which can persuasively simulate visual, auditory, and even tactile sensations, won’t feel convincing enough without also incorporating smell, the next and perhaps ultimate frontier, given how difficult it is to substitute. A fan of the outdoors like me wants to get a whiff of the horse poop.

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Foreign Policy: Pentagon Says UAE Possibly Funding Russia’s Shadowy Mercenaries in Libya

 Experts have long suspected that the UAE may be using Russian private military contractors to help obfuscate its role in the conflict—a charge that Abu Dhabi denies—but the report is the first public, official assessment of the arrangement. [...]

But the revelation that those Russian mercenaries may have been bankrolled by one of America’s closest military allies in the Middle East further complicates the calculus for Washington, and comes as Democrats in Congress have been mounting a campaign to oppose the Trump administration’s proposed $23 billion sale of F-35 fighter jets to Abu Dhabi. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is set to hold a closed hearing on the arms sale early Monday evening. [...]

While private military contractors are outlawed within Russia, a network of companies collectively known as the Wagner group has been at the forefront of Russian interference efforts abroad from Ukraine to Libya and Sudan. The Kremlin’s increasing reliance on the group has lent its overseas operations a veneer of plausible deniability, but Wagner is deeply entwined with Russian military and intelligence structures and the Department of State has characterized it as a “surrogate for the Russian ministry of defense.”

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Social Europe: Brexit and the misunderstanding of sovereignty

 From the start, Brexit was a quixotic project. Take the symbolic centrality of fishing—which makes up less than 0.1 per cent of the UK’s economy—to the negotiations over the future relations between the UK and the EU. There are many substantive issues at stake, but understanding Brexit requires a grasp of the strange, profoundly anachronistic, English understanding of sovereignty upon from which it is derived. [...]

Even within global politics sovereignty no longer refers exclusively to the capacity of the state to make arbitrary decisions, but rather to its international obligation ‘to preserve life-sustaining standards for its citizens’, while more widely observing the rule of law and postwar conventions on human rights. Sovereignty is thus about the responsibility to protect the rights and interests of the population, not control.

The key feature of the ‘Westminster model’ is that it does not differentiate between constitutional and normal law. Not only can any piece of legislation be undone by simple-majority vote; Parliament is also omnicompetent, as its legislative powers can override all claims to fundamental rights. For example, John Selden famously argued that Parliament could even make staying in bed after 8 o’clock a capital offence.[...]

Given all this, the European public can only hope that leaders in the UK and elsewhere—especially in those central- and eastern-European states whose obstinacy about the rule of law is based on a similar misreading of sovereignty—learn this lesson without doing too much harm to their peoples. If they do not, the result will be a less co-operative, less prosperous, more divisive and more dangerous environment, in Europe and around the world.

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Vox: Why the US waits so long to swear in the new president

 American law specifies that the US presidential election happens in early November. It also specifies that the winner of that election isn’t actually sworn in until January 20th. That leaves about two and a half months in between, where, in situations where the incumbent has been voted out, the winner of the election still isn’t president. This is the “transition” period, during which the old administration trades places with the new one.

But does that period really need to be so long? In 2020, we found out what happens when an incumbent president loses reelection, but refuses to concede: Among other things, it pushes the start of the transition several weeks later, shortening that handover period. So does that matter? What actually happens in those two and a half months, and why do we let the loser continue to wield power for so long?

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SciShow Psych: The Dark Side of Disgust

 We’re all super familiar with the feeling we get when we smell rotten food or see gross bodily fluids. But this visceral emotion does a lot more than that, and it’s important understand to how the darker side of disgust can influence us.