John Neffinger has a decade of experience preparing speakers and speeches for public audiences and media appearances, working with progressive politicians at the national and local level, corporate and academic leaders, and other folks who want to do their best for their audiences.

John and his partners recently worked with Harvard economists on research that shows how critical politicians' non-verbal communication is to their electoral success, and developed a tool called the virtual primary to gauge politicians' prospects for success on the stump.

John has served as communications director for the national security and science faculty at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and previously worked on international education issues with former National Economic Advisor Gene Sperling. As a management consultant, John prepared and delivered presentations on strategic issues for executives at over a hundred major companies in the U.S. and overseas. He holds honors degrees from Harvard College and Columbia Law School.

John can be reached at john@KNPcommunications.com.


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Professor Westen received his B.A. at Harvard University, an M.A. in Social and Political Thought at the University of Sussex (England), and his Ph.D. in clinical Psychology at the University of Michigan, where he subsequently taught for six years. For several years he was Chief Psychologist at Cambridge Hospital and Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School. His major areas of research are personality disorders, eating disorders, psychotherapy effectiveness, adolescent psychopathology, political psychology, and the interface of psychodynamics and neuroscience. He is an occasional commentator on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” and his holiday song, "Oy, to be a Goy on Christmas," still airs on the radio in New York during the holiday season.

Visit thepoliticalbrain.com for more information.


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Rachel Sklar is the Media & Special Projects Editor for the Huffington Post and is the editor of the site's Eat The Press page. She has contributed to The New York Times, The New York Post, The Village Voice, Glamour, New York Magazine, The Financial Times and numerous publications in her northern homeland of Canada, and is a frequent guest on MSNBC's Scarborough Country, as well as occasional turns on other programs and networks. She is currently working on Jew-ish, a humorous book about cultural identity, for HarperCollins and is the author of A Stroke of Luck: Life, Crisis and Rebirth of a Stroke Survivor (with Howard Rocket, Canada: 1998). She was previously the editor of FishbowlNY, a New York-based media industry blog, and currently posts random musings at her new blog, Tomatoes Are Delicious (because, really, they are). She was formerly a corporate lawyer in New York and Stockholm, where she never learned to like herring.

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