In this survey paper we collect several known results on destroying tall ideals on countable sets and maximal almost disjoint families with forcing. In most cases we provide streamlined proofs of the presented results. The paper contains results of many authors as well as a preview of results of a forthcoming paper of Brendle, Guzmán, Hrušák, and Raghavan.

We study the Mathias–Prikry and the Laver type forcings associated with filters and coideals. We isolate a crucial combinatorial property of Mathias reals, and prove that Mathias–Prikry forcings with summable ideals are all mutually bi-embeddable. We show that Mathias forcing associated with the complement of an analytic ideal always adds a dominating real. We also characterize filters for which the associated Mathias–Prikry forcing does not add eventually different reals, and show that they are countably generated provided they are Borel. We (...) give a characterization of ω\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\omega}$$\end{document}-hitting and ω\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\omega}$$\end{document}-splitting families which retain their property in the extension by a Laver type forcing associated with a coideal. (shrink)

We continue with the study of the Katětov order on MAD families. We prove that Katětov maximal MAD families exist under $\mathfrak {b=c}$ and that there are no Katětov-top MAD families assuming $\mathfrak {s\leq b}.$ This improves previously known results from the literature. We also answer a problem form Arciga, Hrušák, and Martínez regarding Katětov maximal MAD families.