For the Fall 2014/Winter 2015 series Joshua Wolf Shenk, author of the recently published book, Powers of Two, Seeking the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs curated three Cheap Talk conversations focused on collaborations with, in and around Los Angeles, a city that presents many challenges.

Christopher Hawthorne has been the architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times since 2004. Before coming to The Times, he was architecture critic for Slate and a frequent contributor to the New York Times. He is the author, with Alanna Stang, of The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture. Hawthorne grew up in Berkeley and has a bachelor’s from Yale, where he readied himself for a career in criticism by obsessing over the design flaws in his dormitory, designed by Eero Saarinen.

Joshua Wolf Shenk is a curator, essayist, and author, most recently, of Powers of Two: Seeking the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs (Eamon Dolan Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). His magazine pieces include cover stories in Harper’s, Time, and The Atlantic, where his essay “What Makes Us Happy?” was the most read article in the history of that magazine’s website. His work has also appeared in Slate, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and the national bestseller Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression, edited by Nell Casey. His first book, Lincoln’s Melancholy, was named one of the best books of 2005 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlanta-Journal Constitution, and won awards from The Abraham Lincoln Institute, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, and the National Mental Health Association.