hejenemy's Notes
2026
2025
Exercised
Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding
By Daniel E LiebermanNot great, honestly. Not bad, either, but mainly not memerable. The book explores how odd the idea of exercise is; why is it good for us? Is it even good for us? Did we evolve for this? If not, why is it still good? Etc.
When Jesus Became God
The Struggle to Define Christianity During the Last Days of Rome
By Richard E Rubenstein
The heart of Arianism was the idea that radical improvements in human behavior need not await the apocalypse or be limited in this world to a cadre of religious specialists. With its popular base among city artisans and workers, sailors and merchants, monks, sodalities of virgins, and young people, it represented a radical impulse in Christianity: the drive to infuse worldly existence with the spirit of Christ, and so renew human society.
Arius’s Jesus: a beacon of moral progress sent not so much to rescue helpless humans as to inspire them to develop their own potential for divinity
Was the Arian controversy resolved? Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians who today recite the Nicene Creed (as amended at Constantinople) would doubtless answer, “Of course.” With the adoption of the Cappadocian Fathers’ theology, the Catholic Church recognized Jesus as God incarnate, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. Arianism in its original form disappeared rapidly as a living force within the Roman Empire, and by the seventh century the last of the Arian tribes in Western Europe had been converted to Catholicism. About one thousand years later, Arian beliefs would be espoused by a number of well-known English Protestants, some of whom would go on to create Unitarianism. But for most Christians the question of Jesus Christ’s divinity was settled at Constantinople in 381
2018
Swing Time
By Zadie SmithI may not be experienced enough in reading fiction, but this one didn't do it for me. Genuinly, I just don't think it was for me, at this time. Not that I necessarily disliked anything here -- I thought it was a well written book, and sometimes quite engaging -- but I really have no takeaways. Nothing really moved me, I don't feel particularly more empathetic of the biracial experience, or with income inequality issues, or with any of the topics that are Smith seems to graze by but never really attack head on. I've read other reviews of this book, and they are overwhelmingly effusive. I've seen this book on many 'best-of' lists, or editor's picks, etc, and I just don't get it. In The Guardian, Tayei Selasi says of this book: "Swing Time has brilliant things to say about race, class, and gender, but its most poignant comment is perhaps this. Given who we are, who we are told that we are not, and who we imagine we might become, how do we find our way home?" See, now that does sound like a good book. But I just didn't get any of it. Maybe I'm too dense, or maybe I was too sleepy reading this before bed, but the whole thing came off very forgettable. Some quotes that I did like...
Whenever I spotted him in my reluctant daily walk around the village ... Fern would be locked in an intense discussion with men and women of every age and circumstance, crouching by them as they ate, jogging next to the donkey-drawn carts, always listening, learning, asking for more details, assuming nothing until he was told it. I compared all of this to my own way of being. Keeping to my dank room as much as possible, talking to no one if I could help it, reading books about the region by the light of a head-torch, and feeling a homicidal fury, adolescent in nature, towards the IMF and the World Bank, the Dutch who'd bought the slaves, the local chiefs who'd sold them, and the many other distant mental abstractions to which I could do no practical damage. and, "So, you see, a lot of money will be saved there, for sure," she said, and folded her hands in her lap to formally mark the end of this thought, and I did not contest her. But I could see she wanted to talk, that her pat phrases were like lids dancing on top of bubbling cooking pots, and all I had to do was sit patiently and wait for her to boil over.
2013
Basque History of the World
The Story of a Nation
By Mark KurlanskyWe're going back to Donostia in a couple weeks, and I thought it would make sense to check out some history from the region. It always comes back to Joshua Foer's Moonwalking with Einstein observation that the more you know, the more you remember. I thought it was great - though a little bias toward the Basques (which was also reflected in reviews of the book elsewhere). Still, as usual with books like this, I was pretty surprised with the magnitude of things I was totally unaware of. Anyway, a few of the things I managed to remember...
- Basque folks have the highest (by a lot) concentration of type-O (RH negative) blood in the world. Because of blood type mismatches, babies without similar characteristics are often miscarried (or at least were, pre WWII before modern medicine), which acted as a natural way to preserve this very pure bloodline.
- There's a tree in Guernika of immense cultural importance that has stood for hundreds of years. I want to go see it in person. It looks pretty epic.
- The USA gave soft support to Basque nationalists (who, fought against Franco and Hitler in WWII) but then the USA betrayed them during cold war, when Franco came out as anti-communist.
- Franco ran a fascist regime until the mid 1970s - holy crap. I "kinda/sorta" knew that - I mean, had I seen that on a multiple choice question I think I would have gotten the right answer... but had I had to write an essay about "Which current eurozone country had a radical fascist dictator until the mid 1970s and an unstable government pretty much until you finished high school?" I would not have been guessing.
- ETA seems like a very interesting organization, I'd really like to know more about them. This book seemed very pro-Basque, (and pro-ETA), so I'd certainly be interested in hearing the other side. Obviously it's a really complicated situation. ETA killed people... though they also seemed pretty instrumental to ending the Franco regime... and since the late '90s have vowed against using violence to affect change.
- To be considered a Basque citizen, you don't need any heritage or bloodlines from the region. To be Basque is simply to be fluent in both their language and culture. I love that.
2011
Moonwalking with Einstein
The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
By Joshua FoerUg. Too far behind to write what this book deserves. This is probably my fave book of this year. It's all about how how memory works. In short - humans evolved to have fantastic memory and comprehension regarding spacial relationships. For instance, walk through a building or a strangers home and after one minute you're very familiar with the surroundings. A week later you could probably still describe the area, layout, decoration, etc, fairly well. But lists of information are new to humans, so we're terrible at remembering them.
The book describes a technique called a 'memory palace' - where you literally construct a virtual space inside your head, and then imagine whatever information you want as objects in that space. I tried it, it works.
2010
End of Wall Street
By Roger LowensteinThe one sentence review of this book is "the longest newspaper article I've ever read." It is concise, clear, and presents the facts in comprehensive but still approachable way. What it isn't, is a good book.
It has no narrative, no drive. It moves through the financial crisis chronologically, and honestly it just feels like someone picked out highlights from the WSJ over those two years. I'm not sure why the book is even broken into chapters, since each one is exactly like the last. Too Big To Fail covered this same content, but as a narrative. The characters had depth and motivations. A good example is when Joe Gregory at Lehman stepped down with Callan, the young CFO. TBTF had spent a long time talking about Gregory's relationship with Fuld, how he had appointed Callan and supported her, the mistakes that both of them made, etc, such that when they stepped down I actually cared, and I knew how big a hit it was to Fuld and how it changed the culture of the firm. In this book, the same scene is one sentence long. It goes something like "that week Joe Gregory, a Lehman exective, and the CFO Erin Callan abruptly resigned." Weak. And I'm not picking and choosing... TBTF covered pretty much every topic in more detail and in a more engaging way.
During the second half of the book, things pick up a little bit and become more engaging. This is during the actual Sep-Oct 08 timeframe, during those few weeks where the whole system was just falling apart. Still though, as a whole, this book seems like cliffs notes for TBTF. It covers all the content, but leaves out the good parts that really make it worth reading. I'm very surprised it's by Lowenstein, the same author of When Genius Failed, which was an extremely engaging account of the LTCM disaster.