EP7. Spilling the ‘Cup of Tea’: Matt Ridley and Luke Sheehan on China and COVID origins
Release Date: 04/29/2024
EP 16 “He Bought Plato” a conversation with John Dillon
Cassandra Voices Podcast
John Dillon, Regius Professor of Greek (Emeritus) at Trinity College Dublin, is an Irish classicist and philosopher considered a world authority in ancient philosophy and Platonism. Born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1939, he returned to Ireland as a child and studied Classics at Oxford before earning a Ph.D. at UC Berkeley. He taught at Berkeley from 1969 until his appointment at Trinity in 1980, where he remained until his retirement in 2006. Dillon is founder and Director Emeritus of the Dublin Plato Centre and a member of several prestigious academies, including the Royal Irish Academy and the...
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EP 15 The Ghosts of Monto: Terry Fagan on 1950s Dublin
Cassandra Voices Podcast
Terry Fagan is a renowned Irish local historian and storyteller from Dublin’s North Inner City. Born in the 1950s and raised in the historic heart of what was once Europe’s largest red-light district, the Monto, Fagan witnessed firsthand the rapid transformation, and often erasure, of the surrounding Dublin tenements and their culture. He is, to this day, one of the best living sources of lore and information about this lost world, as well as a collector of histories of it. In the 1970s, Fagan began his historical work by recording oral histories from local...
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EP 14 Patrick Cockburn: on Syria and Ukraine
Cassandra Voices Podcast
“The Christians are frightened, the Alawites are frightened” It has been one year since Cassandra Voices forayed into podcasting. The guest for our podcast’s first-ever episode — the extraordinary journalist Patrick Cockburn — returns to talk with Luke Sheehan through Syria, Ukraine and Gaza, and his recent writings on these wars. Host: Luke Sheehan Music: Loafing Heroes - Produced by Massimiliano Galli -
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EP 13 Philip McDonagh: 'We Urgently Need a Global Vision'
Cassandra Voices Podcast
In a turbulent period in European history, and beyond, we are delighted to draw on the sage input of the former Irish ambassador to Russia, Philip McDonagh, who also worked for a long period on the Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland. He explores the possibilities for a lasting, inclusive peace between Russia and Ukraine. He also laments the expansion of military investment in the U.K. and the rest of Europe, calling for a new global vision to contend with the troubles of our time. Host: Frank Armstrong Music: Loafing Heroes - Produced by Massimiliano...
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EP 12 My Mother (at the Time)
Cassandra Voices Podcast
‘My Mother (at the Time)’ is a special episode of our Cassandra Voices podcast, fitting for an installment that marks the one year point since its inception. For this episode, host Luke Sheehan travelled to Amsterdam to interview the Irish critic, art historian and Joycean named Patrick Healy. A brilliant scholar, Healy was born to an unmarried mother and raised in fosterage with multiple families. He impressed his peers at college in 80s Dublin but soon felt alienated enough to start a life of intermittent exile, wandering Europe, mastering German and Dutch, evolving into a scholar of art...
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EP 11 BONUS EXTRA "It is Abhorrent to Stage an Image" A Conversation with George Azar
Cassandra Voices Podcast
Part 2 of "It is Abhorrent to Me to Stage a Picture…” A Conversation with George Azar Host: Luke Sheehan Music: Loafing Heroes - George Azar: An Introduction George Azar was born in 1959, the descendant of Lebanese olive farmers who had set sail from Beirut a century earlier. They settled in South Philadelphia, a working-class enclave—later immortalized in ‘Rocky’. It was a mix of Italians, Irish, Polish, Jewish, and Lebanese families, a tough, mafia-controlled neighborhood where people staked their claims street by street. After graduating from UC...
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EP 11 "It is Abhorrent to Stage an Image" A Conversation with George Azar
Cassandra Voices Podcast
"It is Abhorrent to Me to Stage a Picture…” A Conversation with George Azar Host: Luke Sheehan Music: Loafing Heroes - George Azar: An Introduction George Azar was born in 1959, the descendant of Lebanese olive farmers who had set sail from Beirut a century earlier. They settled in South Philadelphia, a working-class enclave—later immortalized in ‘Rocky’. It was a mix of Italians, Irish, Polish, Jewish, and Lebanese families, a tough, mafia-controlled neighborhood where people staked their claims street by street. After graduating from UC Berkeley in...
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EP.10: ‘Inside the Belly of the Beast: Reporting on U.S. Foreign Policy from Washington D.C.’ with guest Anya Parampil.
Cassandra Voices Podcast
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. In this podcast Anya likens writing about U.S. foreign policy from Washington D.C. to working...
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EP.9 HIT IT! Hustling and the Ivory Tower with Max McGuinness
Cassandra Voices Podcast
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 co-editing a collection about Marcel Proust and Ireland, The Irish Proust, which is forthcoming from...
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EP8. Lockdowns: ‘A Flawed Consensus: COVID-19 in Africa’ with guest Professor Toby Green
Cassandra Voices Podcast
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 discusses the application, more widely, of a form of authoritarian capitalism that lingers to this day,...
info_outlineIn 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’ compound in Beijing – and to the tropical southern borderlands of Yunnan, Burma and Laos. Evidence has trickled into the debate like the steady drops in water torture: by summer 2022, when the paperback of Viral was published, it was necessary to add an update to the epilogue. A genetically closer virus to COVID-19 had been found, this time in Laos. That discovery added to the vast puzzle around the origins, and, like the account of Chinese workers falling sick in a Yunnan cave at the start of the work, directed attention to the tropical south, the home of the bat colonies sampled by the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In this conversation, Matt Ridley and Luke Sheehan trace out some of the local particularities of the pandemic’s eruption in China, with the latter’s personal experience there coming to the fore.
Episode Credits:
Host: Luke Sheehan
Music: Loafing Heroes - https://theloafingheroes.bandcamp.com
Produced by Massimiliano Galli - https://www.massimilianogalli.com
Links:
‘Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19’ by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley:
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/viral-matt-ridleyalina-chan?variant=40127936987170
China and COVID origins essay by Luke Sheehan:
https://www.lilliputpress.ie/uncategorized/post-china-post-5-by-%E9%B2%81%E7%A7%91
Associated Press article by Dake Kang: