“Chief Justice Gants has said that if he couldn’t have played for the Red Sox, being chief justice ultimately was a good second, solid choice,” Gov. Maura Healey said.
Jennifer Smith
Jennifer Smith writes for CommonWealth Beacon and co-hosts its weekly podcast, The Codcast. Her areas of focus include housing, social issues, courts and the law, and politics and elections. A California native who also lived in Utah, Jennifer has covered Massachusetts since 2011 for a variety of publications. She worked breaking news in the Boston Globe’s metro section and provided courtroom coverage of the Boston Marathon bomber trial for the international wire service Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA) while completing her undergraduate journalism degree at Northeastern University in Boston. For four years, Jennifer was a staff writer and later news editor for the Dorchester Reporter, covering her home neighborhood and the city of Boston with a particular focus on politics and development. Her work and commentary have appeared in WBUR, GBH News, Harvard Public Health Magazine, and Politico’s Massachusetts Playbook. She has co-hosted MassINC’s Massachusetts politics and policy podcast The Horse Race since 2018, interviewing newsmakers, journalists, and elected officials across the state.
Posted inHousing
Business leaders say housing shortage is top concern
THROUGHOUT THE PANDEMIC, labor shortages and supply chain issues bedeviled Massachusetts businesses. But business leaders say the housing crisis in Massachusetts is now the major existential threat to the state’s […]
Posted inMarijuana
What does potential fed shift on cannabis mean for states like Mass.?
While proponents of social equity in the marijuana industry are cheering the sentiment, they say these more lenient federal gestures, which are silent on established state cannabis regulations, could create confusion.
Posted inHealth Care
Status of primary care system keeps slipping
The Center for Health Information and Analysis and Massachusetts Health Quality Partners unveiled a primary care dashboard on Thursday to track the primary care situation, and officials from both organizations sounded alarm bells at the initial findings.
Posted inGambling
Mass. Gaming Commission studying online casino games, AI use
The Massachusetts Gaming Commission is trying to get its arms around the technological future of gambling – seeking bids for research into the potential impacts of “iGaming” and the use of artificial intelligence in the gaming industry.
Posted inCourts
Uber, Lyft say they aren’t transportation companies, liken themselves to travel agents
The latest leg in a multi-front worker classification fight kicked off in Suffolk Superior Court on Monday, with the start of Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s lawsuit against ride-share giants Uber and Lyft.
Posted inState Government
Senate readies for budget ‘dance’ with familiar clashes between chambers
While waving off the question of new tax streams for another time, Senate leadership is touting its proposed budget as first and foremost an “education budget” that takes a meaningful swing at the underlying barriers to full participation in the workforce and educational attainment.
Posted inBallot Questions
SJC appears open to letting tipped-worker question go to ballot
MULLING A CHALLENGE to a tipped-wage initiative proposed for the November ballot, justices of the Supreme Judicial Court on Wednesday seemed skeptical of arguments that they should keep the measure […]
Posted inBallot Questions
SJC probes ‘relatedness’ for app-based driver ballot petitions
THE SUPREME JUDICIAL COURT on Monday began to tackle an assortment of potential 2024 ballot measures that would establish the status and rights of app-based drivers. Initiative petitions put forth […]
Posted inEducation
Response to Gaza campus protests demonstrates lack of preparation
With commencements approaching at campuses riven by pro-Palestinian protests, security expert Juliette Kayyem says we’re seeing a “lack of preparedness” on the part of universities for something “already known on the calendar.”
Posted inPolitics
New Hampshire robocalls stir up new firestorm over artificial intelligence
New Hampshire Democrats received calls before their January primary asking them not to vote until the November general election – the caller purportedly President Joe Biden himself. It wasn’t a human impersonator on the other line, but an AI-generated voice that sounded like the president.
Posted inGovernment
Paul Grogan reflects on a career of civic transformation, ambition, and luck
At 73, Grogan considers his civic legacy in a new memoir – Be Prepared to Be Lucky: Reflections on Fifty Years of Public and Community Service – co-written by former Cincinnati Foundation president Kathryn Merchant.
Posted inBy The Numbers
Mass. residents don’t support hemp THC loopholes
Those who say they have used or purchased marijuana are slightly more likely to support the sale of the hemp-based products outside of the dispensary system, but more say they still want it to be limited to dispensaries. A substantial majority – 65 percent of respondents – said that legalizing marijuana broadly was the right thing to do in the state.
Posted inEnvironment
When young people think about the climate, despair follows
A new Earth Month poll of middle school and high schoolers across the country found that 72 percent of poll respondents say climate change is already impacting their lives – with 30 percent saying it already has a major impact and 42 percent saying a minor impact – and 53 percent believe it will be a major problem over the course of their lives.
Posted inHealth Care
Could consumer representation on hospital boards have prevented Steward problem?
On The Codcast, Donahue reflected on the history of health planning councils in conversation with hosts Paul Hattis of the Lown Institute and John McDonough of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Posted inPolitics
Political Notebook: Something Fish-y, civics swipe, charter fall
Rep. John Rogers apparently never talked to officials at Mass General Brigham, but he said in a Facebook post on April 11 that he did talk to Gov. Maura Healey, Medical Properties Trust, and “members of the MGB board of directors who love the Norwood project and want the deal done.”
Posted inState Government
As state leans in on artificial intelligence, AG Campbell waves a yellow flag
Attorney General Andrea Campbell says AI has tremendous potential, but warns it has “shown to pose serious risks to consumers, including bias, lack of transparency or explainability, implications for data privacy, and more.”
Posted inHousing
In Milton dispute, AG Campbell will work with the town, but ‘the state trumps’
Only two towns – Milton and Holden – are considered “non-compliant” by the state, with Milton the only town to deliberately blow past its deadline to submit a zoning plan earlier this year.
Posted inHealth Care
Health Policy Commission wary of Steward-Optum deal
“I think the underpinning piece is what happens to patients, and what happens to the small community hospitals out there in terms of their ability to stay viable and to provide care,” said commissioner Barbara Blakeney. “The impact of this is just mind-bogglingly complex and potentially harmful.”
Posted inBy The Numbers
Poll indicates young people aren’t betting on sports as much as feared
One year into legalized sports gambling and growing concern about its impact on the young, a new CommonWealth Beacon/GBH News poll doesn’t paint a clear-cut apocalyptic picture.
Posted inCourts
Is collecting your data the modern wiretap?
Could using AdTech software to monitor a public website visitor’s online actions amount to an illegal wiretap in Massachusetts?
Posted inCourts
Arguments in 7-Eleven franchise case ‘almost incomprehensible’
A case that has ping-ponged between state and federal courts considering whether 7-Eleven franchisees are independent contractors or employees under Massachusetts law left the SJC openly befuddled.
Posted inHealth Care
When hospitals make bad neighbors
“The big flashy hospitals that everybody thinks about when we think about the largess of American health care – and they have incredible accomplishments happening inside their walls – one of the things we notice is that not only does it not translate to local communities, but hospitals actually turn out to be pretty poor neighbors a lot of the time and actually have negative effects,” said Jonathan Wynn, chair and professor of sociology at UMass Amherst.
Posted inHousing
Political Notebook: MBTA panel clash | A fare deal | Call him Charlie
Tension over the MBTA Communities Law was on display Wednesday night at a CommonWealth Beacon panel in Quincy as a state legislator who voted for the law – and feels it did not go far enough – clashed with a city council president who expressed reservations with the top-down nature of the state telling cities and towns what to do.