Where is string theory today?

Here’s the laundry list: 

– SUSY gauge theory and its application to the study of manifold invariants.

– Amplitudes i.e. reformulating the rules of perturbative calculations in SYM and SUGRA using twistor and other methods

– Higher spin gravity in AdS (Vasiliev) and its description in terms of CFTs

– application of AdS/CFT to condensed matter, hydrodynamics, quark-gluon plasma, study of entanglement entropy of quantum systems

– extended objects in M-theory

– Firewall debate (einstein-rosen = einstein-podolsky-rosen? see paper by Maldacena)