This New Yorker piece is a comical riposte to the NY Times article cited in the epigraph. I remember the original Times article well because it was discussed here on Hacker News and inspired this extraordinary comment recommending its own version of a follow-up study, one involving a video camera, 20 photographs with multiple-choice descriptions of smells, and a "treatment room":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10807897