Flops and about: a guide

Stratified flops show up in the birational geometry of symplectic varieties such as resolutions of nilpotent orbits and moduli spaces of sheaves. Constructing derived equivalences between varieties related by such flops is, strangely enough, related to areas in representation theory and knot homology. In this paper we discuss how to construct such equivalences, explain the main tool for doing this (categorical Lie algebra actions) and comment on various related topics.