The study of turbulence near walls has experienced a renaissance in the last decade, in part because of the availability of high-quality numerical simulations. The viscous and buffer layers over smooth walls are now fairly well understood. They are essentially independent of the outer flow, and there is a family of numerically-exact nonlinear structures that predict well many of the best-known characteristics of the wall layer, such as the intensity and the spectra of the velocity fluctuations,...