"A steady diet of science news is bad for you: You are what you eat, and if you eat only science reporting on fluid situations, without a solid textbook now and then, your brain will turn to liquid."

I would recommend digging up the paper that generated the press release; if you can't understand it, you don't understand the controversy.

"Can you recommend a good textbook for QM or general relativity?"

Feynman Lectures vol. 3 for QM, and Gravitation for GR (be warned that the latter uses grad-school-level math).