What Up Holmes?
Radiolab24 Okt 2025

What Up Holmes?

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 Warning
Facebook Supreme Court
The Trust Engineers

EPISODE CREDITS:
Reported by - Latif Nasser
Produced by - Sarah Qari
with 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 radiolab@wnyc.org.


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.


Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(670)

23 Weeks 6 Days

23 Weeks 6 Days

When Kelley Benham and her husband Tom French finally got pregnant, after many attempts and a good deal of technological help, everything was perfect. Until it wasn't. Their story raises questions tha...

11 Sep 1h 3min

60 Words

60 Words

We’re coming up on the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and it had us thinking about an episode we produced in 2014. It’s the story of one sentence, written in the hours after September 11th, 200...

4 Sep 58min

Dolly Parton's America: Sad Ass Songs

Dolly Parton's America: Sad Ass Songs

The world lost a legend recently, and we wanted in some small way to pay tribute to the great Dolly Parton. So we’re playing you an episode from a series we had a small part in back in 2017, Dolly Par...

28 Aug 1h 4min

Patient Zero

Patient Zero

The greatest mysteries have a shadowy figure at the center—someone who sets things in motion and holds the key to how the story unfolds. In epidemiology, this central character is known as Patient Zer...

21 Aug 51min

Nigel and the Real Gannet

Nigel and the Real Gannet

In 2016, Chris Bell, a ranger with New Zealand’s Department of Conservation, was the sole human inhabitant of a small island off the west coast of the country, called Mana Island. He was there to take...

14 Aug 25min

Red Herring

Red Herring

It was the early '80s, the height of the Cold War, when something strange began happening off the coast of Sweden. The navy reported a mysterious sound deep below the surface of the ocean. Again, and ...

7 Aug 36min

The Shoe Thrower

The Shoe Thrower

When no one seems to be listening, how far do you go to be heard? In December 2008, George W. Bush made a surprise visit to Baghdad for a press conference. And at the very end of his remarks, a shoe c...

31 Jul 1h 17min

Return of Alpha Gal

Return of Alpha Gal

Several years ago, in 2016, we told a story about Amy Pearl. For as long as she could remember, Amy loved meat in all its glorious cuts and marbled flavors. And then one day, for seemingly no reason, ...

24 Jul 55min

Populært innen Vitenskap

fastlegen
tingenes-tilstand
romkapsel
liberal-halvtime
jss
rekommandert
vett-og-vitenskap-med-gaute-einevoll
tomprat-med-gunnar-tjomlid
villmarksliv
forskningno
fjellsportpodden
sinnsyn
rss-paradigmepodden
tidlose-historier
dekodet-2
rss-rekommandert
rss-overskuddsliv
nevropodden
rss-inn-til-kjernen-med-sunniva-rose
nordnorsk-historie