Fall 2011…

One thing I love about New York City is that we throw lots of Yiddish words into everyday conversation.  I moved here around 18 years ago, and I regret spending a childhood devoid of words like schvitz, schande, kvetch, kvell, nudnik, schmooze, macher and mishegas.  How on earth did I manage communicate?  (I did know some analagous Pennsylvania Dutch words -- yooks, gretz, rootsch, schlumpet…

One of the hardest things to deal with in mediation, or in every day conversation for that matter, is silence. Venting, cursing, rambling, rattling on, this we can handle -- we can reflect, reframe, summarize, repeat, validate -- you name it.  But pregnant pauses, awkward silences, teenage sullenness, hangdog moping --…

I'm a visual learner with a limited attention span, and I like to draw.  So, when I teach and train, I use cartoons, visual metaphors, and pop culture references as (hopefully) entertaining mnemonic devices.  Above is a picture of me spieling about Community Cooperative Advocacy (more on that in an…

Brad Heckman-  Let’s face it, mediation is way underutilized.  We help more than 10,000 New Yorkers find creative and durable solutions to their conflicts every year, but we’re about 6,990,000 short of our goal.  Here are some pitfalls I’ve fallen into in my own efforts to get…

Here are some interesting links I came across this week:

• For those of you in the academic world who haven’t heard of this free citation service, Zotero, check it out. Makes collaboration, citation and organizing your sources much easier.
• In the face of the recent attention afforded to the London riots, this view is…

Lost in Translation, Sofia Coppola's 2003 meditation on isolation, loneliness, and the need to connect, features Bill Murray as a sadsack actor who's in Japan to film a lucrative whiskey commercial.  There's a great scene in which Murray receives long, elaborate, instructions from an impassioned Japanese director which are translated into absurdly short, enigmatic phrases.  Have a…

Peter Falk left this mortal coil on June 23.  Mostly known as the schlumpy, deceptively dim Detective Columbo in the eponymous 1970's TV series, he also had an admirable film career.  He was superb in John Cassavettes' Husbands and A Woman Under the Influence...movies that out-indie today's…

I love technology, specifically twitter. Jason Dykstra (@jasondyk) and I have been talking for about a month or so and jointly decided to put together a twitter chat specifically for professionals in the ADR field…

I moved to New York City's East Village 18 years ago, long after its gritty punky heyday. While I missed out on the Ramones and the Talking Heads gigging at CBGB's, the hood was still a cauldron of art, music, fashion and activism, with just a soupcon of edgy danger.  It's now widely regarded as a cliché of New York City gentrification.  Today, CBGB's is an unaffordable (for…

There is a crack in everything.  That’s how the light gets in.  –Leonard Cohen

I was delighted to see this quote in The Crossroads of Conflict: A Journey Into the Heart of Dispute Resolution by Ken Cloke, the brain and soul behind Mediators Beyond Borders, inter alia.

Canadian song-poet Cohen is one of those…

Growing up, I was such a Beatles nerd.  I turned 13 the year John Lennon was assassinated.  I was grateful for being diagnosed as nearsighted that year, because I got my parents to buy me Lennonesque glasses (which I later exchanged for Elvis Costello specs).

If you think of any cluster of people in pop culture — like a band or a sitcom cast — you can…

Mediators offer a new book for soldiers to help resolve conflict:

Living in a military community, I am surrounded by both family and friends who are effected by war. Many times the conflict that surrounds both the soldiers and families grows more intense with each new deployment, each family event that has been missed, and then falling back into everyday life. The conflicts and…

Here are just some of the professions represented among New York Peace Institute mediators:

Hostage negotiator, United Nations diplomat, Broadway producer, judge, NYPD detective, animal rights activist, stand-up comedian, closet space organizer, homemaker, lawyer, doctor, dog trainer, transit worker, mussel farmer, TV producer, journalist, actor, philanthropist, mystery novelist, social worker, marketing executive,…

I used to work for Partners for Democratic Change (www.partnersglobal.org), a wonderful organization committed to promoting peaceful conflict resolution worldwide.  My job was to set up the first community mediation centers in the former Soviet bloc.

So I brought a couple of…

[In a partial response to people who have asked me what I actually do when I'm on the road...]

I recently presented a paper at IACM's conference in Istanbul on recent developments & new trends in negotiation teaching. The full text of the paper is now available on SSRN (click One-Click Download) for anyone who'd like to take a look.

If you've made your way through…

Bryan Hanson- One of my roles at the…