Roughly 1 in every 30 births is a pair of twins. Uncommon yet not rare, there’s an ambivalence to twinness, what anthropologist Philip Peek terms the “centrality of liminality.” More than a binary, twins are both one and two, and this logical ambiguity can be the source of harmony, as with the yin-yang duality, or evidence of a disturbing glitch, as in the uncanny of the doppelgänger.

For our eleventh issue, we are pairing these myriad responses with the twins that provoke them: The Adventures of Mary-Kate & Ashley (1994-1997), alter egos, ambiguous images / reversible figures, Aphex Twin, The Ashvins, bigenderism, bipolarity, The Bobbsey Twins, Body Double (1984), Candomblé & the erê, Cândido Godói, changelings, chirality, cloning, compounding, conjoined & separated, cryptophasia, Dead Ringers (1988), Dolly, doppelgängers, double entendres, doublespeak, double yolk, dyads, echoism & narcissism, Enemy (2013), evil twins, Flowers in the Attic, freemartins, Fregoli & Capgras delusions, The Frozen Ark, Fuxi / 伏羲 & Nüwa / 女媧, The God of Small Things, Gemini season, heautoscopy, The House of Yes (1997), I Know This Much Is True, The Icarus Girl, identical & fraternal, Igbo-Ora—the Twin Capital of the World, Irish twins, Jacob & Esau, Jeena & Sunny Han, Ka, Kepler-186f, Lev & Austin Grossman, lookalike models & matching techniques, mirror twins, noms de plume & de guerre, The Parent Trap (1961 & 1998), Philip K. & Jane C. Dick, polar bears, POPSUGAR’s #twinning, Prince Lindworm, Pythagorean Table of Opposites, radical & mitigated dualism, Sebastian & Viola, separated at birth, sequential & simultaneous hermaphrodites, sister cities, The Solitary Twin, soulmates, Sound of Ceres’ The Twin, stunt doubles, symmetry & isometry, syzygies, thesis-antithesis, tukuy ima qhariwarmi, tulpas & Twin Peaks (1990-1992, 2017), twin cities & conurbation, Twins Days, Two-Spirit, the uncanny valley, Us (2019), Vardøger, wax museums, yanantin, yin & yang, Yoruban ìbejì & the concept of ejiwapo, “...and twins!”

Issue 11 will be published in October 2019. To learn how to contribute, read our submissions guidelines.