few books have generated as much anticipation here in the CommonWealth office as Jacob Hacker’s The Great Risk Shift. In terms of addressing themes we keep coming back to in […]
Robert Keough
Posted inEnvironment
Climate change
By now, it is old news that MassINC president and CEO Ian Bowles has left to become Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs in the administration of Gov. Deval Patrick. […]
Posted inUncategorized
A fading Dream
All summer and fall, we at CommonWealth, in tandem with our MassINC colleagues, have been at work on a series of background papers on key issues and trends in Massachusetts, […]
Posted inPolitics, Transportation
Second-Guesswork
> technically, there was a Big Dig before Fred Salvucci. The idea of putting the elevated Central Artery underground first surfaced, as it were, in the Boston Transportation Planning Review—Gov. […]
Posted inArts and Culture, Economy
Anthony Flints This Land takes a whack at suburban sprawl
This Land:The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of AmericaBy Anthony FlintBaltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 310 pages with gov. mitt Romney a self-declared lame duck, it is by no […]
Posted inPolitics
Rereading CommonWealth
Spring 2006 ORIGINALLY, I PLANNED to treat the 10th anniversary of the magazine as an excuse to re-read – and, I must confess, when it comes to some older issues […]
Posted inEconomy
Historian Thomas O’Connor on making Boston the Athens of America
Thomas O’Connor has been telling Boston’s story for more than three decades. His 1976 book, Bibles, Brahmins, and Bosses, based on a series of lectures delivered at the Boston Public […]
Posted inEconomy
“Strapped” author Tamara Draut explains why young adults arent getting ahead
In her new book, Strapped: Why America’s 20- and 30-Somethings Can’t Get Ahead, Tamara Draut crunches numbers and interviews young adults across the country to show how, for the generations […]
Posted inUncategorized
Is the home we long for within our reach or beyond it?
Growth & Development Extra 2006There is quite possibly no word in the English language more evocative than “home.” The very sound of it is rich, warm, comforting; the word lends […]
Posted inUncategorized
Development expert Joel Kotkin on suburban life: Mend it, don’t try to end it
Growth & Development Extra 2006 His latest book is The City: A Global History, but it is as America’s leading defender of suburbia that Joel Kotkin has made a mark. […]
Posted inCriminal Justice
Approaching Re-entry
As candidate for governor in 1990, Bill Weld put it in the most stark terms – pledging to “reacquaint felons with the joys of busting rocks” – but the general […]
Posted inEconomy
Immersion journalist Barbara Ehrenreich finds that landing a middleclass job is more of a challenge than surviving on lowwage work
You can’t exactly call Barbara Ehrenreich the left’s answer to David Brooks. But if the conservative New York Times columnist’s book-length observations on the lives of the comfortable (Bobos in […]
Posted inEconomy
Corporate Citizens
There is no question that the announcement in January that Procter & Gamble, the Cincinnati–based consumer-products conglomerate, would acquire the Gillette Co., a Boston stalwart, struck a nerve. Partly, it […]
Posted inEducation
Is it higher ed’s turn
Bearing the title Investing in Our Future, the report of the Senate Task Force on Public Higher Education, chaired by Sen. Steven Panagiotakos of Lowell and Sen. Stanley Rosenberg of […]
Posted inPolitics
Meeting him halfway
Recently, as I contemplated Massachusetts politics, my mind turned to physics. Since science was never my strong suit, this is by no means a common occurrence. But it crossed my […]
Posted inEducation
Author Peter Schrag talks about the Hancock case and the slippery concept of adequacy in education
As of this writing, the state’s Supreme Judicial Court has yet to hand down a ruling in Hancock v. Driscoll, the latest round of educational-equity litigation that has been on […]
Posted inPolitics
Gallup’s top pollster says that our leaders dont pay enough attention to the wisdom of the people
In the home stretch of a hotly contested presidential campaign, it seems hard to imagine that public opinion is not getting sufficient attention. After all, hardly a day goes by […]
Posted inPolitics
Outbreak of democracy
For the first time in its history, Boston is about to play host for one of the great spectacles of partisan politics, a national party convention. How fitting that this […]
Posted inEconomy, Health Care
Anticipation and anxiety in our health care economy
When the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce installed Dr. James Mongan, president and chief executive of Partners HealthCare, as chairman of the board in May, the symbolism did not go […]
Posted inPolitics
A Boston Globe summer series was narrative journalism at its best
Editor’s note: This article has been updated since the print (and pdf) version went to press.When the Pulitzer Prizes were announced April 5, the folks on Morrissey Boulevard had reason […]
Posted inEconomy, Politics
Sociologist Thomas Shapiro says that a lack of assets, not income, is holding African-Americans back
On the issue of economic inequality, Americans are of two minds. On the one hand, we value opportunity over security, balancing a meager safety net (compared with other developed countries) […]
Posted inEconomy, Health Care
Economist David Cutler says increased life expectancy comes at a price and we havent figured out how many more years we want to pay for
Harvard economist David M. Cutler’s new book, his first, has a catchy, if somewhat threatening, title: Your Money or Your Life. The subtitle promises “strong medicine for America’s health care […]
Posted inCriminal Justice
Its time for Romney to reform the correctional system
Pledging themselves to the cause of reform, Gov. Mitt Romney and his team have taken on a number of shibboleths in state government during their first year in office. From […]
Posted inEconomy, Politics
Down but not out
SPRINGFIELD, THE STATE’S third largest city and the metropolitan anchor of western Massachusetts, is in the soup. To say it is on the brink of disaster might be going too […]
