  The first part of this talk reviews recent developments in flavor physics
that can be made without detailed understanding of hadronic physics, driven by
the data. The error of sin(2beta) has shrunk below 5%, and the measurements of
alpha and gamma have reached interesting precisions. For the first time, there
are significant constraints on the deviations from the standard model in B-Bbar
mixing and in b->s and b->d transitions. In the second part, I review some
theoretical developments for exclusive semileptonic and nonleptonic B decays
that have become possible using the soft-collinear effective theory. I
concentrate on topics where the recent progress has model independent
implications for interpreting the data.
