A View From String, Soft Hair and All That Fuzz

Black holes provide an ideal playground for attempting to unmask the secrets of quantum gravity. Understanding the statistical origin of black hole entropy in terms of its microstates and how this information gets encoded in radiation as the black hole evaporates is central to this endeavor. I will highlight aspects of this problem and some of the successes in the context of string theory and the holographic principle for Anti de Sitter space before discussing new avenues that attempt to formulate a holographic principle for quantum gravity in asymptotically flat space relevant for describing the black holes in our universe.