QCD, with strings attached

In the nearly 20 years that have elapsed since its discovery, the gauge-gravity correspondence has become established as an efficient tool to explore the physics of a large class of strongly-coupled field theories. A brief overview is given here of its formulation and a few of its applications, emphasizing attempts to emulate aspects of the strong-coupling regime of quantum chromodynamics (QCD). To the extent possible, the presentation is self-contained, and does not presuppose knowledge of string theory.