This tenth-anniversary volume is an occasion to read A Journal of Critical Thinking and Writing reflexively, by turning its focus on critical thinking and writing back on itself as an academic genre that organizes knowledge according to time.A journal assumes time to be a linear, unidirectional movement segmented into a past, which has already happened; a present, which is happening; and a future, which has yet to happen.This sequence is inscribed in a journal's paratextuality, such as a chronological division into annual volumes, which conforms reading to knowledge configured temporally: a reference to a text locates that text in the past; an argument against locates a text in the present; and questions for further research locate a text in the future.This commonplace notion of time informs a process of inquiry understandable across the disciplines, but it is also at odds with disciplinary theories of temporality.Consider, for a moment, how the visual arts can realign perception with uncommon patterns of time.When this volume's cover image is viewed according to its title, Counter-Curve (see Figure 1), it creates a curvilinear motion that either quickens along contracting concentric circles or slows along expanding concentric circles.Each motion, as a counter-curve, implies the other, inverse motion, but the either/or structure of perception limits our awareness of time's bidirectionality, described by the image's artist, Dana Karwas (n.d.), as "a single moment curving infinitely around on itself" (para.10).As a moment, time is undivided into past, present, and future.It is instead composed of recurrences that simultaneously spiral inwardly toward an infinitesimal center of nonrecurrence, a point of origin, and outwardly toward an infinite circumference that is the end of time.Because our perception can align with time's contraction or expansion, but not both at once, Counter-Curve can perhaps explain an otherwise paradoxical experience of the moment as ephemeral and durable.If the last ten years of Double Helix is telescoped to this swirl of time, then the practice of reading the journal changes.It locates one in the moment, a condition of "mindfulness" that Ellen Carillo (2016) has advocated for reading, in which one sustains attention to the text, undistracted by the past or the future, because, in this case, neither the past nor the future exists.A sequence of texts is thereby converted into an intertext, and a reference to, an argument against, and questions for further research become recurring features of intertextuality that advance an area of knowledge toward pure originality and the completion of knowledge as ideal and inverse limits of inquiry (see Figure 2).

In his 1959 Rede Lecture, "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution," C. P. Snow warned of a gulf that had opened between literary intellectuals and natural scientists, across which existed a mutual incomprehension that threatened to undermine the university's ability to solve the world's most pressing problems.Reflecting on his experience as both a novelist and a research scientist, Snow appealed for a greater understanding between what he saw as two distinct cultures, yet he also asserted the importance of the sciences over literature for securing humanity's future prosperity.According to Snow, literary intellectuals were natural Luddites, and the university needed to prioritize the training of scientists and engineers in order to accelerate global industrialization and thereby raise standards of living.His privileging of the sciences drew a scathing rebuke from the literary critic F. R. Leavis, who pilloried Snow's understanding of literature and his faith in technological progress.For Leavis, bringing the Industrial Revolution to impoverished areas of the globe could indeed improve the material conditions of humankind, but such a project ungoverned by the values conveyed through literature, especially those insights of D. H. Lawrence and other novelists into the dehumanizing effects of industrial labor, would lead to a future divested of any real quality of life.Leavis insisted, therefore, that the university revolve around English studies as its "centre of human consciousness" (2013, p. 75).This dispute between Snow and Leavis touched off "the two cultures controversy," which has been an important point of reference amid the shifting terrain of higher education.The phrase has come to denote a gulf that opens between any disciplines bound to "common attitudes, common standards and patterns of behavior, common approaches and assumptions" (Snow, 1998, p. 9) that divide them into opposing cultures and inhibit crossdisciplinary understanding.Buller (2014), for example, described the two cultures in terms of those who believe the purpose of colleges and universities is to educate "the whole person" versus those who believe it is to train students for the workforce.The latter culture, according to Buller, tends to include governors, legislators, and trustees who are inclined to divert resources away from the social sciences, arts, and humanities to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.Their assumption is that the STEM disciplines will best prepare students for careers offering the greatest return on their investment in a college education.The opposing culture, most often composed of faculty and administrators, argues that a well-rounded education produces graduates who are better informed, challenge assumptions more readily, participate more fully in society and civil discourse, and in general live healthier and more productive lives.Buller observed that "the two sides are not so much talking to one another as shouting past one another, each contingent building its case on a set of assumptions that it regards as universally true and that is dismissed by its opponents as the result of blindness, hypocrisy, or both" (p.2).This situation stands in contrast to the lack of engagement Halsted (2015) observed between the culture of academia and that of the tech industry.He pointed out that although a number of the most significant

Over the last seven years, I have spent time across three continents talking to scientists and mathematicians about their beliefs and attitudes and experiences related to writing in their respective disciplines. I have been impressed by the passion and insight with which most have talked about writing and its relationship to critical thinking, and I have often been surprised by how they engage in these practices. For example, rather than working from an a priori hypothesis, many researchers in the STEM disciplines compose backwards, from the results to the introduction. And when reading, many seem to move from the middle of a paper outwards, beginning with the results and method, using an extremely critical eye, and then perhaps scanning out to the introduction and the discussion, or dispensing with these sections altogether. Over and over again, I heard this same story from different scientists, as if it were a secret each alone had stumbled upon.

Welcome to Double HelixSeattle has its double helix pedestrian bridge.The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) outside Chicago has its gold-colored double helix staircase within the Proton Pagoda