It has been almost 40 years since the Hawking argued that black hole evaporation violates unitarity. High energy physicists largely believed the problem was solved because of black hole complementarity and AdS/CFT. There has been a recent surge in interest due to a recent paper about “firewalls” by Almheiri et. al. which argues that the postulates of black hole complementarily are mutually inconsistent. I will discuss the information paradox, the fuzzball proposal of Mathur and the recent firewall idea and how they are similar/different. I will also discuss some attempts to do away with fuzz/fire at the horizon.

There has been much recent interest in building consistent truncations of higher-dimensional supergravity down to gauged supergravity in four and five dimensions, motivated by various holographic applications of string theory. I will review recent progress in this direction, focusing on complete classification results for the D=4 N=2 gauged supergravities with AdS vacua that consistently arise from M-theory on a large class of seven-dimensional manifolds. The latter include both well-known compactification spaces in the Sasaki-Einstein class, and other spaces equipped with different G-structures. The D=4 supergravities they give rise to upon truncation exhibit very interesting features like non-abelian gauge groups, vacuum supersymmetry breaking and massive scalar and vector Kaluza-Klein modes.