What Up Holmes?

Radiolab

WNYC Studios

History, Documentary, Natural Sciences, Science, Society & Culture

4.6 • 43.5K Ratings

🗓️ 24 October 2025

⏱️ 35 minutes

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Summary

Love it or hate it, the freedom to say obnoxious and subversive things is the quintessence of what makes America America. But our say-almost-anything approach to free speech is actually relatively recent, and you can trace it back to one guy: a Supreme Court justice named Oliver Wendell Holmes. Even weirder, you can trace it back to one seemingly ordinary eight-month period in Holmes’s life when he seems to have done a logical U-turn on what should be say-able. Why he changed his mind during those eight months is one of the greatest mysteries in the history of the Supreme Court. (Spoiler: the answer involves anarchists, a house of truth, and a cry for help from a dear friend.) Join us in an episode we originally released in 2021, as we investigate why he changed his mind, how that made the country change its mind, and whether it’s now time to change our minds again. Special thanks to Jenny Lawton, Soren Shade, Kelsey Padgett, Mahyad Tousi and Soroush Vosughi.LATERAL CUTS:Content WarningFacebook Supreme CourtThe Trust EngineersEPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Latif NasserProduced by - Sarah Qariwith help from - Anisa Vietze Signup for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected]. Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Wait, you're listening.
0:01.6	Okay.
0:02.9	All right.
0:04.0	Okay.
0:05.4	All right.
0:07.0	You're listening to Radio Lab.
0:09.8	Radio Lab.
0:10.3	From W. N.Y.
0:12.4	See.
0:13.4	Rewind.
0:15.7	Rewind.
0:19.7	Hey, it's Latif. This is Radio Lab. So just last week, here on the show, we had a conversation
0:25.1	between our own Simon Adler and law professor Kate Klonic, talking about how the idea of free speech
0:32.2	in this country is playing out, and often not playing out, online right now.
0:39.4	But these questions of free speech in the United States go back literally to the beginning.
0:47.6	It's the first amendment for crying out loud.
0:51.6	And as we argue over what people should be seeing on these apps, on social
0:58.1	media apps, it took me back to a story we did a couple years ago that feels like it gets to
1:04.2	the origin of the modern notion of free speech. In particular, the idea that there should be an open marketplace
1:12.1	of ideas, right? That's the reason any of these social media platforms are allowed to be as wild as they
1:18.6	are because they are theoretically open marketplaces of ideas. And as I told our then host,
1:25.4	Jad Abamrod, surprisingly, that whole idea of the marketplace of ideas came from one moment and even more surprisingly from one guy.
	...

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