What We Are Reading Today: The Annotated Hodgkin and Huxley

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Updated 24 January 2022
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What We Are Reading Today: The Annotated Hodgkin and Huxley

Authors: Indira M. Raman and David L. Ferster

The origin of everything known about how neurons and muscles generate electrical signals can be traced back to five revolutionary papers, published in the Journal of Physiology in 1952 by Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley.

The principles they revealed remain cornerstones of the discipline, summarized in every introductory neuroscience and physiology course.

Since that era, however, scientific practice, technology, and presentation have changed extensively. It is difficult for the modern reader to appreciate Hodgkin and Huxley’s rigorous scientific thought, elegant experimental design, ingenious analysis, and beautiful writing.

This book provides the first annotated edition of these papers, offering essential background on everything, from terminology, equations, and electronics, to the greater historical and scientific context surrounding the work.

 


What We Are Reading Today: Worldly Afterlives by Julia Stephens

Updated 24 December 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: Worldly Afterlives by Julia Stephens

Indian migrants provided the labor that enabled the British Empire to gain control over a quarter of the world’s population and territory. In the mid-1800s, the British government began building an elaborate bureaucracy to govern its mobile subjects, issuing photo IDs, lists of kin, and wills. It amassed records of workers’ belongings such as handwritten IOUs, crumpled newspaper clippings, and copper bangles. 

“Worldly Afterlives” uses this trove of artifacts to recover the stories of the hidden subjects of empire. Navigating the remains of imperial bureaucracy — in archives scattered across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas — Julia Stephens follows migrant families as they traverse the Indian Ocean and the British Empire. She draws on in-depth interviews to show how the histories of empire reverberate in the present.