Summary

Chapter 10, “What Doesn’t Kill You Will Make You Reek: A Brief History of Stink Bombs.” The author describes reading her first officially secret file – one that contained a letter addressed to scientist Stanley Lowell (referred to in the previous chapter), who was being asked to develop both a universally disliked odor and the means for deploying it against an enemy with a goal to demoralizing that enemy. The author then describes what went into the creation of “Who, Me?”, an artificially developed odor that evoked the worst bathroom odors which were themselves believed to be the one sort of odor that everyone hated. The author writes of visiting an experimental facility continuing the research into bad odors and their potential deployment, and of smelling “Who, Me?”, and finding both it and other artificially created odors to be almost debilitating. She then writes about...