I review recent analytical and numerical advances in the study of non-equilibrium quark-gluon plasma physics. I concentrate on studies of the dynamics of plasmas which are locally anisotropic in momentum space. In contrast to locally isotropic plasmas such anisotropic plasmas have a spectrum of soft unstable modes which are characterized by exponential growth of transverse (chromo)-magnetic fields at short times. Parametrically the instabilities provide the fastest method for generation of soft background fields and dominate the short-time dynamics of the system.

8 pages, 3 figures; Contribution to the proceedings of the International Conference on Strong & Electroweak Matter 2006, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY, May 2006