THE CODCAST
Tune into spirited debate, local stories, and insightful analyses with The Codcast. Hosted each week by a CommonWealth Beacon reporter, the half-hour policy podcast delves into the heart of Massachusetts’s most pressing and intriguing topics.
Hear newsmakers, historians, and policy experts tackle statewide housing struggles, immigration policies, little-known histories, surprising political fights, and even take to the sea to visit rising offshore wind turbines.
Your Massachusetts midterm rundown
On this episode of The Codcast, we get listeners all caught up on the political landscape in Massachusetts and around the country heading into the crucial 2026 midterm elections.
🔉 Listen nowYou have questions about ballot questions. We answered them.
On this special episode of The Codcast, we answer listener-submitted questions all about the field of nine ballot questions this November.
🔉 Listen nowLive debate: Should Mass. adopt all-party primary elections?
A debate between the campaigns supporting and opposing ballot Question 3 and the effort to bring all-party primaries to Massachusetts
🔉 Listen nowWhy three red states are suing Mass. over abortion
The legal challenge comes as the country considers the messy legal question of whether reproductive care services are being provided where the patient is — which may be a state with a ban — or where the abortion medication is issued. Â
🔉 Listen now‘A disbelief that the disparity could be so wide’
In 2015, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston found that white households in Boston had a median wealth of $247,500, while Black households had a median wealth of close to $0. That was more than ten years ago. Now, the Boston Fed has released a new report examining the wealth gap across Massachusetts. Have things improved? What trends do we see in the new report? And how has the ongoing affordability crisis affected wealth disparities?
🔉 Listen nowWhere organized labor hits the ballot
Organized labor has been out in force on ballot measures — recently literally trying to secure bargaining power through the ballot — and that means manpower, mobilization, and money funneling toward a set of policy measures that the Legislature has waved away. This week on The Codcast, CommonWealth Beacon reporter Jennifer Smith looks at unions and direct democracy with two guests.
Nick Juravich, associate professor of history and labor studies and associate director of the Labor Resource Center at UMass Boston, breaks down where we sit in the history of unions and ballot efforts. Then Chrissy Lynch, head of the…
🔉 Listen nowArtificial intelligence enthusiasm and energy needs clash on Healey’s docket
Gov. Maura Healey is all-in on artificial intelligence, but she’s also trying to get a handle on soaring energy costs and a growing backlash to the very structures supporting the AI boom — data centers. This week on The Codcast, CommonWealth Beacon reporters Jennifer Smith and Jordan Wolman discuss the governor’s new executive order trying to make data centers greener and more responsive to community feedback, and the paradox of pushing for expanded AI usage as communities revolt against its infrastructure.
🔉 Listen now
Massachusetts’s dwindling maternity care
This week on The Codcast, CommonWealth Beacon reporter Hallie Claflin talks with Alecia McGregor, assistant professor of health policy and politics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Katie Murphy, president of the Massachusetts Nurses Association. They dig into the consequences of recent maternity unit closures in Springfield and Methuen, discuss where Massachusetts stands in terms of maternal health care access, and detail what power the state has, if any, to regulate health service closures and consolidations.
🔉 Listen nowHow New England’s largest nonprofit senior care and housing provider is handling immigration and Medicaid changes
We all need care as we age. Adam Scott leads New England’s largest nonprofit provider of senior care and living communities. He says demand is rising as the Commonwealth’s average age continues to increase. This week on Health or Consequences, John McDonough of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Paul Hattis of the Lown Institute talk with Scott about how the broader health care crisis is impacting long-term care.
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