Publishing During War: March at Kollo Media

Hey everyone, Ben here. A few days after I sent the February newsletter, the US and Israel attacked Iran. Since the attack is an international military assault without public support or clear objectives, and the Trump Administration’s reasoning has been inconsistent or absent completely, and the internet blackout has made information from Iran difficult to come by, there has been a lot of criticism and discussion about the media’s role in presenting and explaining it to us all.

When it’s not support for the assault, the throughline is a sense of helplessness, confusion, and powerlessness. A grappling for a sense of reason and comprehension. Public intellectuals write about walking “through my library” looking for ideas that will save us.

Our releases in March are part of our ongoing attempt to really look at the thing, too. Not just the war in Iran, but the effects of the myths we tell ourselves, and what ideas we should be aware of as we try to navigate this stressful and dangerous time.

As always, we’re excited share all our updates with you and hope to see you at one of our events very soon.

First off, by popular demand, we finally put up a sources list for BAD COUSINS, which is good fun.

Also, before we publish our final episode 6 about the more radical and progressive ways to understand the Abraham myths, we published a bonus episode about Purim and the Iran War.

As the first bombs were being dropped from American and Israeli warplanes, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a speech explicitly connecting the biblical story of Purim - a court drama in which Jews are threatened and then annihilate their enemy in Ancient Persia - with the attack on Iran.

Again, we're able to use the BAD COUSINS framework to analyze the ways that politicians use biblical and religious stories to explain, win support for, and push their own (often violent and chaotic) agendas.

Using the biblical sources and Elliot Horowitz's excellent 2008 book Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence, Matan connects the Abrahamic family to Haman, the antagonist of the Purim story, and explains the far-right Zionist perspective on Amalek, the vague enemy of all Jews.

We then discuss why the Purim story shouldn't be thrown out of the Jewish canon, despite the way it's used to justify so much violence, and find a few threads of hope and inspiration in the story and its characters.

Simplify published two more episodes in March. We also got our first offer from an advertising agency about representing us - which is very exciting!!

More important though were the ideas that we talked about, especially the trap of revenge in relationships, and ways to de-stress at work in these crazy times:

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Around her appearances at the Leipzig Book Fair, we also published Ursula Bittner’s Greenwashing as our newest audiobook (German only). It exposes all the green lies behind companies’ claims to be doing more for the environment. After all, greenwashing is a billion-dollar business itself.

You know how all the airlines offer expensive add-ons to “go green”? Yeah, that.

The book is actually a Greenpeace report, and the third release we’ve done with oekom here in Germany, a publisher focusing on giving green and alternative ideas a platform.

You can find it on all the usual places to get your audiobooks! Or click “Höre jetzt das ganze Hörbuch an” here for more links.

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