AI Summary
5 min read🎙️ The Voices & The Context
The Format: This is a classic Radio Lab narrative podcast—part history lesson, part philosophical inquiry, part investigative journalism. It’s a casual, conversational deep-dive hosted by Jad Abumrad and Latif Nasser, who guide the listener through a mystery with the energy of detectives unraveling a cold case.
The Key Players:
- Oliver Wendell Holmes: The legendary Supreme Court justice, described as a "magnificent" figure with piercing blue eyes and a great mustache. He’s the reluctant hero who starts as a free-speech skeptic and ends up writing the most famous dissent in American law.
- Thomas Healy: A law professor who wrote the book The Great Dissent. He’s the obsessive detective who built a spreadsheet to track every single day of Holmes’s life for a year and a half to solve the mystery of why he changed his mind.
- Nabiha Sayed: A media lawyer and president of The Markup, who brings a modern, critical lens to the "marketplace of ideas" metaphor, arguing it ignores power imbalances and the rights of listeners.
The Vibe: Intellectual, Surprising, and Philosophical. It starts with a historical mystery (why did Holmes flip?) and builds into a modern crisis (why is the internet’s "marketplace" failing?). The tone is earnest but playful, with moments of genuine awe and frustration.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **🎙️ Introduction: Thomas Healy & Oliver Wendell Holmes**
- 2 (03:30) **Holmes's Anti-Free Speech Stance**
- 3 (08:12) **The Great Switch: The Abrams Case**
- 4 (10:00) **The Investigation: The House of Truth**
- 5 (13:40) **The Lobbying Campaign & The Personal Stakes**
- 6 (17:50) **The Breakthrough**
- 7 (19:54) **The Legacy of the Marketplace Metaphor**
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
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:Â
Reported by - Latif Nasser
Produced by - Sarah Qari
with help from - Anisa Vietze
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