From black holes to solvable irrelevant deformations and back
String theory has been remarkably successful in explaining the microscopic origin of the entropy of certain black holes, primarily supersymmetric ones. However, finding the microscopic description of more realistic black holes remains a challenging open problem. In this talk, I will review evidence suggesting that the microscopic description of near- and non-extremal black holes is governed by special irrelevant deformations of two-dimensional conformal field theories. I will then discuss the properties of a particular class of solvable irrelevant deformations of two-dimensional quantum field theories, known as TT– and JTˉJ\bar-deformed CFTs. Finally, I will discuss the lessons that recent progress in understanding these deformations offers for the microscopic description of general black holes.