Most of us are at least somewhat curious about what's going on in areas of mathematics outside our own area of research. If a significant breakthrough is made, and can be stated in language that we understand, then we would enjoy hearing about it. Now, for truly fantastic breakthroughs like Fermat's Last Theorem or the Poincaré conjecture, the mathematical grapevine functions quite well and we all hear about it pretty quickly. For anything below that level, however, I for one feel that there is no good way to find out what is going on in fields other than my own. Every four years I seem to have the following conversation: "Did you hear? So-and-so won the Fields Medal!" "No. And, uh, who in the world is so-and-so?" Shameful.

What I'm wondering is, am I doing something wrong? Does anyone else have a better way of keeping abreast, even at a superficial level, of what major advances are happening in other areas of mathematics? At one time, Mathematical Reviews would select some articles or books for "Featured Reviews." I really enjoyed Featured Reviews and learned about many interesting results this way. However, MR stopped doing Featured Reviews after a while. No official reason was given, but I have heard that one reason was that some people were treating Featured Reviews as judgments as to which papers/books were "the best," and that MR did not want to accept the responsibility for making such judgments, especially if they were going to be used for tenure and promotion decisions. This is understandable, but unfortunate (from my point of view).

The series of books What's Happening in the Mathematical Sciences is also excellent. However, producing an expository article of that quality takes a lot of time, and so What's Happening is necessarily limited in scope. I would like to know what's happening in between issues of What's Happening. If there are resources out there that others have found useful for keeping abreast of mathematical research news, I would like to hear about them.