What We Are Reading Today: The Moth and the Mountain

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Updated 21 November 2020
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What We Are Reading Today: The Moth and the Mountain

Author: Ed Caesar

The Moth and the Mountain restores Maurice Wilson to his rightful place in the annals of Everest and tells an unforgettable story about the power of the human spirit in the face of adversity.
“This is an extraordinary true story about one man’s attempt to salve the wounds of war and save his own soul through an audacious adventure,” said a review in goodreads.com.
Ed Caesar has long been captivated by Wilson, and in The Moth and the Mountain he writes beautifully about the attractions and problems of researching his life.
“Caesar’s fundamental challenge is that very little survives about Wilson beyond official registers, ships’ passenger manifests and some brief diary entries and letters, written in a bland, cheery London slang,” said Rory Stewart in a review for The New York Times.
Caesar is a British author and feature writer who contributes to the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, Outside, the Sunday Times Magazine of London and British GQ. Caesar was named Writer of the Year in 2013 by the UK’s Professional Publishers Association.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘An Introduction to General Relativity and Cosmology’ by Steven A. Balbus

Updated 28 January 2026
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘An Introduction to General Relativity and Cosmology’ by Steven A. Balbus

General relativity has entered a new phase of its development as technical advances have led to the direct detection of gravitational radiation from the merging of single pairs of stellar-sized black holes.

The exquisite sensitivity of pulsar signal timing measurements has also been exploited to reveal the presence of a background of gravitational waves, most likely arising from the mergers of supermassive black holes thought to be present at the center of most galaxies.

This book demonstrates how general relativity is central to understanding these and other observations.