The Speaker succession well never see

When the state House of Representatives voted in January to scrap the eight-year limit on the Speaker’s position, lawmakers came under blistering attack for summarily jettisoning the one true check […]

Backed by an arsenal of data and degrees in medicine and public health, Dr. Howard Koh, the state’s public health commissioner, considers needle-exchange programs a proven way to keep intravenous […]

The American labor movement, facing a falloff in clout as fewer workers wear the union label, is hoping for a shot in the arm from an unlikely source of vigor: […]

A 1996 law aimed at cracking down on serious juvenile lawbreakers has developed a crack of its own. The state Supreme Judicial Court has ruled that juvenile court judges do […]

When Demetri and Linda Theofilou flew east from Chicago in the spring of 1997 to look for a house in the Boston suburbs, they knew they’d have to act quickly. […]

In publishing, like politics, five years can be an eternity. Since 1996, a number of political publications have come and gone. Locally, the liberal opinion journal Otherwise and the state […]

Despite a long economic recovery that has driven unemployment rates to new lows, many Massachusetts residents have not achieved the income level they enjoyed prior to the recession of the […]

Tip O’Neill and the Democratic CenturyBy John A. FarrellLittle, Brown and Co., New York, 776 pagesBack in the Watergate summer of 1974, the syndicated columnist Mary McGrory was waxing eloquent […]

It was a few days before the November election, and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy was determined to prevent the White House from falling into Republican hands. So he stormed onto […]

HOLLAND–It is a quaint, wooded town of 2,300, nestled between Sturbridge and Brimfield on the banks of the pristine Hamilton Reservoir. A white, steepled church, a school, the town hall […]

In the North End, community grows by itself–but for how long? Five years ago, when I first told my Cambridge friends I was moving to Boston’s North End, they said […]

Robert Moses became a legend of the Civil Rights Movement dodging bullets and taking beatings as he organized voter registration drives in Mississippi. Today, he is battling ignorance of a […]

Massachusetts is basking in the economic glow of a record low unemployment rate, which dipped to just over 2 percent last fall. But not all parts of the state share […]

The modern American worker, the most productive and prosperous in history, lives in an increasingly transient society where extended family support networks are stretched thin or are nonexistent, where there […]

Working families in Massachusetts need and deserve the protection of a fair, paid family and medical leave policy that covers all workers. At some point in our lives, all of […]

Almost two months before the DOE’s online conference, Senate President Thomas Birmingham launched the State Senate E-vents by personally engaging in a 32-minute chat with students at Everett High School. […]

PHOENIX–It’s not easy being clean. At least not the first time around.Arizona’s Clean Elections Law was passed in a statewide referendum in 1998, the same year Massachusetts approved its own. […]

AUGUSTA–As snow flecks the graceful, green dome of the Maine State House, the political dust from the November election begins to settle down below. Politicians, lobbyists, bureaucrats, and journalists are […]

It’s not easy to take the pulse of somebody who won’t sit still. And that’s the problem with trying to take stock of the Cellucci-Swift administration at mid-term. Of course, […]

Residents of Massachusetts, like New Englanders in general, are seen as notoriously stingy when it comes to sharing their shekels. But just how stingy has been hard to say. CommonWealth […]

For a bunch of upstarts taking on the mayor, Springfield resident Karen Powell and her group, the Citizens Action Network (CANE), haven’t done too badly. They had already stopped a […]