The Sunday Read: 'The Forgotten Sense'

<p>“Smell is a startling superpower,” writes Brooke Jarvis, the author of today’s Sunday Read. “If you weren’t used to it, it would seem like witchcraft.”</p><p>For hundreds of years, smell has been disregarded. Most adults in a 2019 survey ranked it as the least important sense; and in a 2011 survey of young people, the majority said that their sense of smell was less valuable to them than their technological devices.</p><p>The coronavirus has precipitated a global reckoning with the sense. Smell, as many have found in the last year, is no big deal until it’s missing.</p><p><i>This story was written by <strong>Brooke Jarvis</strong> and recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, </i><a href="https://www.audm.com/?utm_source=nytmag&utm_medium=embed&utm_campaign=the_forgotten_sense" target="_blank"><i>download Audm for iPhone or Android</i></a><i>.</i></p>