For months and months we have been keeping the lid on an exciting piece of news, but now the hour is at hand. We have just been given leave to announce our involvement in an incredibly interesting project (or so we believe).

Our friend Joshua Wolf Shenk (above), non-fiction writer, essayist, and author of the award-winning Lincoln’s Melancholy, has lately turned his focus to examining creative pairs, asking specifically:

What makes creative relationships work? How do two people — who may be perfectly capable and talented on their own — explode into innovation, discovery, and brilliance when working together?

In attempting to answer these questions, Josh has been taking a close look at a wide range of creative pairs—from John Lennon and Paul McCartney to Conan O’Brien and his producer Jeff Ross to Watson and Crick to the Car Talk guys—while exploring various archetypes of creative collaboration. He has been focusing on well-known and unarguably accomplished or important pairs…with one notable exception.

In order to take a close look at collaboration in action, Josh has decided to put on his lab coat and use Robbi and me as guinea pigs in a quasi-scientific “study” of creative collaboration. Over the past six months or so, he has been subjecting us to a variety of tests and evaluations, from psychological surveys to a session with a psychotherapist to an on-site analysis of the barn by a feng shui master, all in attempting to get at the heart of what makes us tick and our collaboration work.

The first public presentation of Josh’s thinking on this front will be published on Slate next Tuesday (September 7), and additional articles will be published weekly thereafter. A series of pieces on Robbi and me will appear in the last week of September.

In the mean time, if this project interests you, please join the Creative Pairs Facebook group, which Josh hopes will be a clearinghouse for discussion about creative collaboration. Building on the writing and thinking he has been doing for the Slate series, Josh plans to write a book on this subject, and he is very interested in drawing on a wide community of ideas and perspectives as he continues his research.

Not convinced?

This is your opportunity to redeem social media by using it for communications of substance, depth, and potential for elevating human understanding!

This is your chance to find out once and for all what makes Robbi draw such unusual things! (That’s why I’m signing up, anyway).

We will have much more to say on this front in the days ahead, but we wanted to let you know about the project and encourage you to join Josh’s group. He is an incredibly thoughtful guy with a bunch of incredibly thoughtful friends, and we imagine the resulting discussion will be fascinating.

So be sure not to sign up if you’re not into that sort of thing.