  The status of chiral perturbation theory in the meson sector is illustrated
with several topical examples. The longtime discrepancy between theory and
experiment for the charged pion polarizabilities has now been resolved in
favour of the chiral SU(2) result to next-to-next-to-leading order. For chiral
SU(3), the main obstacles are the large number of badly known coupling
constants (LECs) and the lack of convergence of the low-energy expansion in
many cases of interest. I describe a new global fit of the LECs in the strong
sector that leads to a prediction of the CKM matrix element $V_{us}$ in
agreement with the latest lattice determinations. The slow convergence of the
chiral series is particularly acute in transitions with strong final-state
interactions calling for dispersive treatments. The status of dispersive
approaches is reviewed for $K_{\ell 4}$ decays and for $\eta -> 3 \pi$ decays
where precise measurements of Dalitz plot distributions have recently become
available.
