a momerama

i.e., a surge of Mommy Brain news. There's a huge story on the maternal brain in the most recent Scientific American -- a comprehensive look at the emerging field, written by Craig Kinsley and Kelly Lambert, the Virginia neuroscientists who've done groundbreaking research with mommy rats. Also, a Brazilian publisher, Rocco, bought the book, which means as of now it's being published in Chinese, Japanese, German, Dutch, Indonesian, Spanish and Portuguese. (This has all been rather surreal for me as I suspected the whole "mommy brain" stereotype dissing maternal intelligence was an industrialized-world if not wholly U.S. phenomenon.) I also got invited to Spain in March by the publisher there who says the book's premise hits a nerve with Spanish moms.
Meanwhile, the Venezuela story I wrote for Smithsonian is finally out -- I did the research for it in August, but in fact nothing major has changed: Hugo Chavez is hanging in there, still driving the Bush Administration nuts. (For the record, I was never the "Latin American bureau chief" for Knight Ridder, as there was no such thing. They had to include a brief bio, so it appears they condensed the fact that I was bureau chief in Mexico City and then in Rio. No biggie.)