For complete citations, see the book’s endnotes. What follows is an overview of my principal sources, organized alphabetically by pairs, followed by my research highlights for major topics, such as creativity, relationships, and social psychology.
Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King Jr.
I began with Abernathy’s book And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: An Autobiography. His reminiscences are also a strong presence in a book edited by his daughter Donzaleigh Abernathy called Partners to History: Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph David Abernathy, and the Civil Rights Movement. King’s writings are collected in a book edited by Clayborne Carson, The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr. For any study of the civil rights era, Taylor Branch’s three volumes are seminal: Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63; Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–65; and At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–68. Branch shared his thoughts with me in an interview.
Marina Abramović and Ulay
Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present, a documentary directed by Matthew Akers and Jeff Dupre, gives an outstanding overview of the Abramović-Ulay pairing and includes considerable footage of their performances. The catalog to Marina’s 2010 Museum of Modern Art retrospective, edited by the curator Klaus Biesenbach, has the same title as the film. James Westcott’s When Marina Abramović Dies is the standard biography of the artist and has a thorough treatment of the Marina-Ulay years. I also consulted Thomas McEvilley’s Art, Love, and Friendship: Marina Abramović and Ulay, Together and Apart. I spoke with Marina and Ulay several times each, and Ulay shared with me an as-yet-undistributed documentary on his own career called Project Cancer: Ulay’s Journal from November to November, directed by Damjan Kozole. Chrissie Iles, a curator at the Whitney Museum, also offered her insights.
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Both Stanton’s and Anthony’s voices are easily accessible via Stanton’s Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences and The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Geoffrey C. Ward’s Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, a companion piece to the Ken Burns documentary of the same name, is an intimate look at these partners. I consulted Jean H. Baker’s Sisters: The Lives of America’s Suffragists; Elizabeth Griffith’s In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton; and Vivian Gornick’s The Solitude of Self: Thinking About Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The scholar Ellen DuBois shared her expertise in an interview.
George Balanchine and Suzanne Farrell
The documentary Suzanne Farrell: Elusive Muse turned me on to this story, which I developed aided by Farrell’s memoir Holding On to the Air, written with the help of Toni Bentley, herself a former dancer at the New York City Ballet and an admired writer on dance and other subjects. Bentley offered context and amplification for the story in an interview. Studies of Balanchine include the fine slim volume George Balanchine: The Ballet Maker, by Robert Gottlieb, and Bernard Taper’s Balanchine: A Biography. I Was a Dancer, by Jacques d’Amboise, Farrell’s frequent dance partner, offered his perspective. Francine Prose’s essay on Farrell in The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and the Artists They Inspired is one of many outstanding portraits in the book, which also includes portraits of Alice Liddell, Elizabeth Siddal, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Gala Dalí, Lee Miller, Charis Weston, and Yoko Ono. “Second Act,” Joan Acocella’s 2003 New Yorker profile of Farrell, was essential, and I benefited from Jennifer Homans’s writing on Farrell’s recent life as a company leader.
Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre
I first encountered Hazel Rowley’s Tête-à-Tête: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre through a review by Louis Menand in the New Yorker, though I later learned that Rowley considered Menand’s conclusions “completely opposed to my own.” I also appreciated Daniel Bullen’s essay on the pair in The Love Lives of the Artists: Five Stories of Creative Intimacy (which also profiles Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé, Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin). For anyone wanting a deeper dive, Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s own works await. Beauvoir published five volumes of memoirs alone, and then there is her Letters to Sartre and his Witness to My Life: The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir 1926–39.
Larry Bird and Magic Johnson
The HBO documentary Magic and Bird: A Courtship of Rivals, directed by Ezra Edelman, is a thorough and intimate portrait featuring interviews with the principals as well as with the journalist Jackie MacMullan, who was the force behind When the Game Was Ours (a book that drew on MacMullan’s more than one hundred interviews, including with Magic and Bird themselves). A joint interview with Magic and Bird on the Late Show with David Letterman on April 11, 2012, was also helpful.
Neal Brennan and Dave Chappelle
I interviewed Neal Brennan in April 2012 and February 2013. Dave Chappelle declined my request for an interview. I appreciated “If He Hollers Let Him Go,” an essay on Chappelle by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah that appeared in the Believer, as well as Kevin Powell’s piece in Esquire titled “Heaven Hell Dave Chappelle.” Chappelle told his own version of his breakdown in a lengthy interview with Oprah Winfrey in February 2006.
Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger
Outstanding biographies have been written about both men: Warren Buffett was profiled in Alice Schroeder’s The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, and Charlie Munger was the subject of Janet Lowe’s Damn Right!: Behind the Scenes with Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger. Michael Eisner’s Working Together: Why Great Partnerships Succeed, written with Aaron R. Cohen, has a good portrait of the pair (along with profiles on Eisner himself and Frank Wells, Bill and Melinda Gates, Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, and many others).
Francis Crick and James Watson
Crick and Watson both left memoirs of their adventures with DNA: Watson’s The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA, and Crick’s What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery. Horace Freeland Judson’s The Eighth Day of Creation: The Makers of the Revolution in Biology gives a thorough history of their work and its milieu. I also drew on the Nova documentary Secret of Photo 51, about Rosalind Franklin, and the PBS film The Secret of Life, directed by David Glover, which has an extensive companion website, http://www.pbs.org/wnet/dna/episode1. Victor McElheny’s Watson and DNA is an erudite guide to the discoveries. The NIH archive has the script of a BBC broadcast called The Race for the Double Helix—Providence and Personalities, published by the Listener on July 11, 1974, which provides a rare transcription of interviews with key players. Robert Wright’s essay on Watson and Crick for Time in 1999 is a concise and artful treatment, as is Nicholas Wade’s 2003 New York Times piece “A Revolution at 50.” I interviewed Dr. Watson at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in August 2013.
David Crosby and Graham Nash
Both artists have memoirs—Nash’s is Wild Tales: A Rock & Roll Life, and Crosby has two, Long Time Gone and Since Then: How I Survived Everything and Lived to Tell About It, both written with Carl Gottlieb. The writer Steve Silberman’s essay on Crosby and Nash for Crosbynash.com gets to the heart of their story, and thanks to Silberman’s introduction, I spent several evenings with Crosby and Nash before and after performances in 2012 and 2013. Dave Zimmer’s Crosby, Stills & Nash: The Biography is an authoritative history of the band.
The Curies
I started with Lauren Redniss’s stellar graphic narrative Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout and turned next to Marie Curie’s Pierre Curie (with autobiographical notes), followed by their daughter Eve Curie’s Madame Curie: A Biography, and Susan Quinn’s Marie Curie: A Life.
Brenda Wineapple’s White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson not only lays bare this critical connection but serves as a model for the scholarship of relationships. (Wineapple has practice; she also wrote Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein.) A second essential text is Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith’s collection of Dickinson’s writings to her sister-in-law Susan Huntington Dickinson, called Open Me Carefully. I interviewed Smith several times and drew on her book Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson. I also benefited from conversations with Christopher Benfey, the author of A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade.
Valentino Garavani and Giancarlo Giammetti
Matt Tyrnauer’s work on this couple is dynamite: “So Very Valentino,” a feature in Vanity Fair, August 2004, and the documentary film Valentino: The Last Emperor. Tyrnauer also sat with me for an interview.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak
Walter Isaacson’s biography Steve Jobs is indispensable, as is Wozniak’s memoir iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon. I also drew on Gary Wolf’s 1998 Wired profile of Wozniak, “The World According to Woz”; Michael Malone’s Infinite Loop: How Apple, the World’s Most Insanely Great Computer Company, Went Insane; and the documentary Steve Jobs: One Last Thing.
John Lennon and Paul McCartney
I started with, and often returned to, The Beatles by Hunter Davies, who watched John and Paul write and record. He captures the flavor of the characters and their scene superbly, and this is the first brick in a towering wall of primary material on Lennon and McCartney. Memoirs by other principal witnesses include Geoff Emerick’s Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles (written with Howard Massey); Pete Shotton’s John Lennon: In My Life (written with Nicholas Schaffner); and Cynthia Lennon’s John. I also drew from Alistair Taylor’s With the Beatles; Derek Taylor’s It Was Twenty Years Ago Today; Tony Barrow’s John, Paul, George, Ringo & Me; Tony Bramwell’s Magical Mystery Tours; George Martin’s All You Need Is Ears (with Jeremy Hornsby); and May Pang’s Loving John (with Henry Edwards). The journalist Ray Connolly’s The Ray Connolly Beatles Archive is also a good primary source.
The interviews of John and Paul themselves are foundational, and the website Beatlesinterviews.org has an impressive number of transcriptions. Paul’s primary contributions to the history comes in Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, a combination of biography and oral history done with Barry Miles, and The Beatles Anthology, both the documentary and book. Anthology also gathers up many of John’s remarks, as well as recollections of George Harrison, Ringo Starr, and others. Major Lennon interviews include his 1970 sessions with Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner—which are available online, in a book by Wenner (Lennon Remembers), and in the original audio via free podcast—and his 1980 Playboy interview with David Sheff, which can be found in Sheff’s All We Are Saying.
Mark Lewisohn’s work is another cornerstone for Beatles research. The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions: The Official Story of the Abbey Road Years, 1962–1970 emerged from his thorough review of the working tapes at Abbey Road. (I’m told by Beatles geeks that John Winn’s two volumes on Beatles recordings—Way Beyond Compare and That Magic Feeling—supplement Lewisohn nicely.) Lewisohn also created The Beatles Day by Day, which, along with Keith Badman’s two-volume The Beatles Diary, accounts for all their known movements. The first of Lewisohn’s three volumes on the band, The Beatles: All These Years, Volume 1—Tune In, which takes the band through 1962, is breathtaking and will be remembered as the turning point between journalism on the band and proper history. Several books go through every Beatles song: I consulted Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties, and musicologist Walter Everett’s astonishingly detailed two-volume The Beatles as Musicians: The Quarry Men Through Rubber Soul and The Beatles as Musicians: Revolver Through the Anthology.
I relied heavily on Beatlesbible.com, which has entries on all the major topics and cites the primary sources. Conversations in the site’s Fab Forum were also helpful. The New York Times music writer Allan Kozinn, author of the outstanding The Beatles, generously offered his thoughts and directed me to good sources, as did the scholar Kenneth Womack, author of Long and Winding Roads: The Evolving Artistry of the Beatles, among other works on the band. Michael McCartney, whose Remember: The Recollections and Photographs of the Beatles includes a proper print of the seminal photograph he took of John and Paul writing “I Saw Her Standing There,” shared with me his memories of the day. Pauline Sutcliffe, author (with Douglas Thompson) of Stuart Sutcliffe: The Beatles’ Shadow and His Lonely Hearts Club, shared her brother’s diaries and letters with me. Four surviving members of the original Quarry Men—John Duff Lowe, Len Garry, Rod Davis, and Colin Hanton—sat with me for an interview, and Davis kindly fielded my questions about the band’s early days in Liverpool.
I also drew on Bob Spitz’s The Beatles; Jonathan Gould’s Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America; Peter Doggett’s You Never Give Me Your Money: The Beatles After the Breakup; Mark Hertsgaard’s A Day in the Life: The Music and Artistry of the Beatles; Philip Norman’s John Lennon: The Life and Shout!; Howard Sounes’s Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney; Larry Kane’s Ticket to Ride and Lennon Revealed; Tim Riley’s Lennon; Lewis Lapham’s With the Beatles; Alan Clayson’s Backbeat: Stuart Sutcliffe: The Lost Beatle; Rupert Perry’s Northern Songs: The True Story of the Beatles’ Song Publishing Empire; and Doug Sulpy and Ray Schweighardt’s Get Back: The Unauthorized Chronicle of the Beatles’ “Let It Be” Disaster.
C. S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien
I owe a debt to Diana Pavlac Glyer for her intricate examination of Lewis, Tolkien, and their collaborators in The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community, and for several interviews. Humphrey Carpenter’s J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography was helpful, as was Carpenter’s The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien and Letters of C. S. Lewis as edited by W. H. Lewis. For more on Lewis, I turned to A. N. Wilson’s C. S. Lewis: A Biography, George Sayer’s Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis, and The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914–1963), edited by Walter Hooper. Colin Duriez’s Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship lent color to otherwise inaccessible moments. Lewis’s own reflections on relationships in Surprised by Joy and The Four Loves were a great aid.
Jerry Lewis’s memoir Dean and Me (A Love Story), written with James Kaplan, was my principal source, along with Nick Tosches’s Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams.
Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso
The Museum of Modern Art’s landmark 2003 show Matisse Picasso yielded a thorough catalog and a revealing interview by Charlie Rose of the MoMA curators Kirk Varnedoe and John Elderfield. I also drew on Jack Flam’s Matisse and Picasso: The Story of Their Rivalry and Friendship; Yve-Alain Bois’s Matisse and Picasso; John Richardson’s 2003 Vanity Fair essay “Between Picasso and Matisse”; and Paul Trachtman’s Smithsonian feature Matisse & Picasso. The MoMA curator Anne Umland helped me look for the relationships between the painters’ work via study of originals in the museum’s gallery.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone
Arthur Bradford’s Comedy Central special 6 Days to Air: The Making of South Park opened up this pair for me. Bradford showed me footage from his upcoming documentary feature on Parker and Stone and shared his observations, as did Kevin Morris, their lawyer; Vernon Chatman, the South Park staff writer; and Jason McHugh, an old friend and colleague. Among the many features on Stone and Parker, I found most helpful their 2000 interview with Playboy; Vanessa Grigoriadis’s piece “Still Sick, Still Wrong,” in Rolling Stone; and the 2011 60 Minutes profile.
Rilke
I relied heavily on the scholar Lewis Hyde’s introduction to a recent edition of Letters to a Young Poet; Sven Birkerts’s fine essay on Rilke included in his collection Reading Life: Books for the Ages; and Mark M. Anderson’s “The Poet and the Muse” from the Nation, on Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé.
Theo and Vincent van Gogh
The foundation for any research on Vincent van Gogh is his own correspondence, and his letters are artfully presented at Vangoghletters.org. An earlier translation, which also includes other family members’ letters, is available at Webexhibits.org/vangogh. Many of Theo’s letters have gone missing, but his voice can be heard in the correspondence with his fiancée, Jo Bonger, collected in a book called Brief Happiness. I dearly appreciated George Howe Colt’s treatment of Vincent and Theo in Brothers: On His Brothers and Brothers in History, which offered many other affecting portraits, including that of James and Stanislaus Joyce. Colt shared his thoughts with me in an interview. Jan Hulsker’s Vincent and Theo van Gogh: A Dual Biography is a major study. For more on Theo I drew on Marie-Angelique Ozanne and Frederique De Jode’s Theo: The Other van Gogh; Chris Stolwijk and Richard Thomson’s Theo van Gogh, 1857 to 1891: Art Dealer, Collector, and Brother of Vincent; Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith’s Van Gogh: The Life; Deborah Silverman’s Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art; Martin Gayford’s The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Provence; and Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker essay “Van Gogh’s Ear.” The writer Gregory Curtis, author of a forthcoming study of van Gogh’s final months, was a regular sounding board and guide.
Mark Rose’s history of invention and copyright, Authors and Owners, is seminal, and Rose unpacked the history of the emergence of the “lone genius” idea for me in several interviews, as did James Shapiro, the Shakespeare scholar whose works include Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, and James J. Marino, author of Owning William Shakespeare: The King’s Men and Their Intellectual Property. Marjorie Garber’s essay “Our Genius Problem” in the Atlantic in December 2002 lays out the history of the genius idea. I learned about Alfonso Montuori through his article “Deconstructing the Lone Genius Myth: Toward a Contextual View of Creativity,” written with Ronald E. Purser, and Montuori was a helpful guide to other work as well. Though it was published near my deadline, too late for me to digest, Darin M. McMahon’s Divine Fury: A History of Genius is a potent cultural history.
In what follows, I’ve included only books, though of course I am indebted to many great articles in academic journals, newspapers, and magazines, documentary films, and interviews online. An asterisk indicates that I interviewed the author.
Teresa Amabile, Creativity in Context
Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work
Frank Barron, No Rootless Flower: An Ecology of Creativity
*Frank Barron, Alfonso Montuori, and Anthea Barron, Creators on Creating: Awakening and Cultivating the Imaginative Mind
Ori and Rom Brafman, Click: The Forces Behind How We Fully Engage with People, Work, and Everything We Do
Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle De Courtivron, Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership
Elizabeth G. Creamer, Working Equal: Academic Couples as Collaborators
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery
*Michael P. Farrell, Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work
Richard L. Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life
Howard Gardner, Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi
Edward Hirsh, The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration
Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From
*Vera John-Steiner, Creative Collaboration
Robert Kanigel, Apprentice to Genius: The Making of a Scientific Dynasty
Wayne Koestenbaum, Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration
Bruce Nussbaum, Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire
*Anne Paris, Standing at Water’s Edge: Moving Past Fear, Blocks, and Pitfalls to Discover the Power of Creative Immersion
Mary Helena Pycior, Nancy G. Slack, and Pnina G. Abir-Am, eds., Creative Couples in the Sciences
*Keith Sawyer, Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration
*Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein, The Company They Kept: Writers on Unforgettable Friendships
Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit and The Collaborative Habit
Harriet Zuckerman, Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States
POWER AND COMPETITION
V. Frank Asaro, Universal Co-Opetition: Nature’s Fusion of Competition and Cooperation
David P. Barash, Beloved Enemies: Our Need for Opponents
Adam M. Brandenburger and Barry J. Nalebuff, Co-Opetition
Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing
Richard Conniff, The Ape in the Corner Office: Understanding the Workplace Beast in All of Us
*Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are
*Dario Maestripieri, Games Primates Play: An Undercover Investigation of the Evolution and Economics of Human Relationships
Dorothy Rowe, Friends and Enemies: Our Need to Love and Hate
RELATIONSHIPS AND PSYCHOLOGY
Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of Love
Jose Luis Alvarez and Silviya Svejenova, Sharing Executive Power: Roles and Relationships at the Top
*Arthur Aron and Debra J. Mashek, Handbook of Closeness and Intimacy
*Elaine Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person
David Bakhurst and Christine Sypnowich, The Social Self
Ellen Berscheid and Pamela C. Regan, The Psychology of Interpersonal Relationships
Melinda Blau and Karen L. Fingerman, Consequential Strangers: The Power of People Who Don’t Seem to Matter . . . but Really Do
*Stuart L. Brown, Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul
*John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick, Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection
Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking
Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives
*Amy C. Edmondson, Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy
*Susan T. Fiske, Social Beings: Core Motives in Social Psychology
*Alan Fogel, Developing Through Relationships
Barbara L. Fredrickson, Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become
Sai Gaddam and Ogi Ogas, A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the Internet Tells Us About Sexual Relationships
Jolene Galegher, Robert E. Kraut, and Carmen Egido, Intellectual Teamwork: Social and Technological Foundations of Cooperative Work
*Alison Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life
Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships
John Gottman, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work
Adam Grant, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success
Richard J. Hackman, Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances
Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
*J. A. Scott Kelso, Dynamic Patterns: The Self-Organization of the Brain and Behavior
J. A. Scott Kelso with David A. Engstrøm, The Complementary Nature
*Michael Maccoby, Narcissistic Leaders: Who Succeeds and Who Fails
*Annie Murphy Paul, The Cult of Personality Testing: How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves
*James W. Pennebaker, The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us
*Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic
*Daniel H. Pink, To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others
Lee Ross and Richard E. Nisbett, The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social Psychology
Daniel J. Siegel, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are
Diana McLain Smith and Peter Senge, Elephant in the Room: How Relationships Make or Break the Success of Leaders and Organizations
*Michael L. Stallard, Fired Up or Burned Out: How to Reignite Your Team, Passion, Creativity, and Productivity
*Frank J. Sulloway, Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
*George E. Vaillant, The Wisdom of the Ego; Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study; and Adaptation to Life
Eudora Welty and Ronald A. Sharp, The Norton Book of Friendships
ADDITIONAL INTERVIEWS
Melea Acker, Mark Allen, Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues, Robbi Behr and Matthew Swanson, Deborah Bell, Roberto Benabib and Jenji Kohan, Jeremy Bernstein, Christina Biedermann, Tessa Blake and Ian Williams, Laurent de Brunhoff and Phyllis Rose, Bethany Burum, Jessica Chaffin and Jamie Denbo, David Crosby and Graham Nash, Lee Damsky, Richard Danielpour, Ian Desai, Matthew Dickman, Deborah Dowling, Amy Edmondson, Eddie Erlandson, Frank Escher and Ravi GuneWardena, Charles Fernyhough, Susan Fiske, Chris Fowler, Peter Freed, Ronald K. Fried, M. Gerard Fromm, Daniel Gilbert, Sam Gosling, Ari Handel, Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, Sheila Heti and Margaux Williamson, Quayle Hodek and Kris Lotlikar, Lisa Iglesias, Molly Ireland, Gavin Kilduff, Mark Lipton, Josh Loeb and Zoe Nathan, Michael R. Maniaci, Dan McAdams, Eric Moskowitz and Amanda Trager, Conan O’Brien, Annalise Ophelian, Ira Robbins, James L. Sacksteder, Sharon Salzberg, George Saunders, Lawrence Schiller, Edward R. Shapiro, Carl Sheingold, Jeff Simpson, Jill Soloway, Abraham Stoll, Claire Sufrin, Yla R. Tausczik, Tenzin Geyche Tethong, Hannah Tinti, Billie Tsien and Tod Williams, Abigail Turin, Timothy Wilson.
James P. Carse’s brilliant work Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility is hard to categorize. Tony Kushner’s afterword to Angels in America, in which he discusses his relationship with Kimberly Flynn and Oskar Eustis, serves as a kind of manifesto on the fundamental of social connection to creativity. It stayed with me throughout this project. William James and Martin Buber have been the godfathers of this book, James as the psychologist I most appreciate and Buber as the fount of the spiritual vision that guided it. Misha Glouberman and Sheila Heti’s The Chairs Are Where the People Go: How to Live, Work, and Play in the City also affected me deeply.