The field of black hole accretion is seeing a renaissance in the past 5–10 years, thanks to the advent of time domain surveys across the electromagnetic spectrum. These surveys monitor hundreds of thousands of galaxies at unprecedented cadence, revealing the secrets black holes were keeping while we weren’t watching. In this talk, I will present recent highlights on black hole accretion and growth in two parts: (1) in “Standard Accretion” events like Active Galactic Nuclei and accreting stellar-mass black holes, where we can use Reverberation Echoes to map the inflowing gas and measure the black hole spin, (2) through the discovery and characterization of exotic transients, like Tidal Disruption Events, and a new phenomenon called Quasi-Periodic Eruptions (QPEs), which have been posited as due to the presence of an orbiting stellar mass object, or EMRI. We will discuss the current state of the field, and implications for joint detections in the next decade.
