These are my proceedings for the 12th Edoardo Amaldi Conference on Gravitational Waves (July 9-14, 2017, Pasadena CA). I summarize how to use black-hole spin dynamics to learn about the lives of stars using gravitational-wave data. There are surprises…

Before the talk, I was awarded the 2016 Stefano Braccini Thesis prize (here is Salvo’s tweet about it).

Davide Gerosa.
Journal of Physics: Conference Series 957 (2018) 1, 012014.
arXiv:1711.10038 [astro-ph.HE].