My posting frequency has decreased since grad school, since while I'm spending about as much time learning as I always have, much more of my pedagogy these days ends up in papers. But I've given a few pedagogically-oriented talks recently that may be of interest to the people who read this blog. I gave a mini-course on "the algebraic approach" at Bootstrap 2024. The lecture notes can be found here , and videos are available here . The first lecture covers the basic tools of algebraic quantum field theory; the second describes the Faulkner-Leigh-Parrikar-Wang argument for the averaged null energy condition in Minkowski spacetime; the third describes recent developments on the entropy of semiclassical black holes, including my recent paper with Chris Akers . Before the paper with Chris was finished, I gave a general overview of the "crossed product" approach to black hole entropy at KITP. The video is available here . The first part of the talk goes back in ti