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While extremal black hole microstates are reproduced by index calculations, the study of near-BPS black holes requires special care to account for quantum fluctuations. A semiclassical analysis indicates that the spectrum of such black holes has a large extremal degeneracy followed by a mass gap up to a continuum of non-BPS states. The inclusion of a theta angle term alters the properties of the spectrum (Witten effect shifting the mass gap and mixed 't Hooft anomaly). This journal club will study two papers by Toldo and Heydeman, [2412.03695] and [2412.03697] where they study 4d near-BPS black holes. As we shall see, a key point of their derivation is the reduction to 2d JT gravity. The dual CFTs are ABJM and some class R (non lagrangian) theories. Since these theories are strongly coupled, the gravity analysis offers a powerful tool to describe their specturm at finite temperature.