Powers of two

A curator and essayist surveys the inner workings of creative duos, from John Lennon and Paul McCartney to Marie and Pierre Curie to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and describes how their creative techniques can be adapted and used in everyday life. "Recently writers like Malcolm Gladwell, Steven Johnson, and Clay Shirky have sought to explain creativity as the work of lucky, hardworking people or the result of certain qualities of a particular environment or group of people. Joshua Wolf Shenk shows how such notions, as appealing as they are, miss the essence of creativity, which is generated by people working in pairs. From John Lennon and Paul McCartney to Pierre and Marie Curie to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Shenk portrays many of history's most iconic creative duos, drawing on new scientific research and building an argument that will reshape our view of the individual, relationships, and society itself. Along the way, he reveals how pairs begin to talk, think, and even look like each other; how the most successful ones thrive on conflict; why they break up; and more. He also marshals new research that suggests how deeply the notion of pairing influences our psyches: even when we're alone, we're collaborating with the voice inside our head. At once intuitive and deeply surprising, Powers of Two is mind-blowing"--