As a journalist, Anya Parampil is unafraid of rattling the cage. She now writes for the Grayzone, founded by her husband Max Blumenthal in 2015, an online publication which aims to ‘break through any narrative of the day that is pushing the United States’ public in support of war.’ Previously she worked as a producer and broadcaster, then an anchor correspondent, for Russia Today (U.S.), from which she was fired, after refusing to accept restrictions on her reporting of U.S. foreign policy. ...

Dr. Max McGuinness is a Teaching Fellow in French at Trinity College Dublin. He previously taught at University College Dublin, the University of Limerick, and Columbia University, where he received his PhD in French in 2019. His first book – published this Spring – is Hustlers in the Ivory Tower: Press and Modernism from Mallarmé to Proust (Liverpool University Press, 2024), which explores how French modernist writers used the press as a forum for literary experimentation. He is currently...

Toby Green is Professor of Precolonial and Lusophone African History and Culture at King’s College, London and the author of A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (2019). He also wrote, along with Thomas Fazi, The Covid Consensus: The New Politics of Global Inequality (2023). This latter work engages with the impact of lockdowns on African countries which were, for the most part, unaffected by the disease itself. In this podcast, Green...

In late 2021, Matt Ridley and Alina Chan published the hardback edition of ‘Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19’. Well received by many and loathed by some, it remains the most comprehensive book on the origin of the pandemic that leans in the direction of the lab. In a debate that has neither gone away nor gotten more polite over time, there is one thing that both sides tend to agree upon: unanswered questions lead back to China, to Wuhan, the WIV and Zhongnanhai, the leaders’...

Aficionados of the Dublin cultural scene over the past decade or two are likely to be familiar with John Cummins. Cutting a dash with a distinctive Rasputin beard and Reggae styles, John’s poetic performances in the Dublin vernacular have mesmerised audiences young and old. His playful, rhyming verse always had great musicality, and it seemed a natural progression for him to begin collaborating with musicians, culminating in the formation of the band Shakalak in 2018, which also contains...

An economist by training, Nadim Shehadi has spent his career analyzing the long, ongoing story of Lebanon. Having lived through Beirut’s ‘golden era’ of post-WW2 prosperity, and subsequently having started out as an academic as the country suffered through civil war and occupation, Nadim has honed his voice and knowledge to become a compelling narrator of everything Lebanese. He is also adept at using themes arising from present-day crises to draw a much bigger historical picture, scanning...

In early 2020, Sunetra Gupta was quietly working on a universal influenza vaccine as Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at Oxford University, while finishing her sixth novel. By then, a new coronavirus had been discovered in Wuhan, China. In response, she and her group produced a paper suggesting, among other scenarios, as much as 50% of the U.K. population had already been infected. This was in stark contrast to the assessment of Professor Neil Ferguson at Imperial College London,...

David Langwallner is an Irish barrister practising in the United Kingdom. A regular contributor to Cassandra Voices, he has represented defendants in criminal cases, including murder, at the highest levels of the U.K. System. He also has extensive experience of constitutional and immigration law and lectured on constitutional law and jurisprudence for sixteen years at The Honorable Society of the King’s Inns in Dublin. Following Julian Assange’s final hearing over his threatened extradition...

Jim Sheridan needs little introduction. His films, including ‘My Left Foot’ (1989), ‘The Field’ (1990), ‘In the Name of the Father’ (1993) and ‘In America’ (2003) have gained both critical acclaim and global audiences. It is fair to say they have helped define the Irish national character. In recent times, Sheridan has taken a keen interest in the unsolved murder of the French television producer Sophie Toscan du Plantier in west Cork in 1996, producing a series for Sky called ‘Murder at the...

Jim Sheridan needs little introduction. His films, including ‘My Left Foot’ (1989), ‘The Field’ (1990), ‘In the Name of the Father’ (1993) and ‘In America’ (2003) have gained both critical acclaim and global audiences. It is fair to say they have helped define the Irish national character. In recent times, Sheridan has taken a keen interest in the unsolved murder of the French television producer Sophie Toscan du Plantier in west Cork in 1996, producing a series for Sky called ‘Murder at the...

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