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 […]
Immunity for juveniles
Heritage Road Five Years Later
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. […]
Fives Are Wild
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 […]
Household Income
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 ONeil man in full
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 […]
Kennedys Bush game
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 […]
Getting Unelected in Holland
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 […]
Bocce alone
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 on the new civil rights crusade
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 […]
Employers look for skills but act on stereotypes
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 […]
Counterpoints
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 […]
Argument
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 […]
Senate President Birmingham shows off his erudition online
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. […]
Education Commissioner David Driscoll holds a current event
The streaming video made Commissioner David Driscoll’s face look like it was melting, and the thread of conversation in the chat room was hard to follow. But other than that, […]
Dispatches from the clean election frontier in Arizona
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. […]
and the clean election frontier in Maine
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 […]
Outgrowing Juvenile Justice
I WAS LOOKING at 10 to 15 years,” says Jamal Vick, in the streetwise way of somebody who’s well-acquainted with the criminal justice system. The bulky 18-year-old dreams of one […]
New Economy New Philanthropy
Not long ago, at an estate-planning seminar, a Boston money manager told this story: He paid a call on an older couple who lived on Cape Cod. They had a […]
Hanging Tough
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, […]
Charitable Giving
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 […]
Starr power at the Springfield UnionNews
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 […]
The death and life of American cities
The Boston Renaissance: Race, Space and Economic Change in an American Metropolis By Barry Bluestone and Mary Huff Stevenson Russell Sage Foundation, New York, 2000, 461 pages Comeback Cities: A […]
Playing their cards rightmdashAn unlikely return to the White House for Bay State Republicans
WASHINGTON–The ouster of the last Republican presidential administration in 1992 brought an end to the special influence a small group of Massachusetts Republicans enjoyed within the inner sanctums of the […]
Wellfleet discovers that good help is hard to find
WELLFLEET–The tourists may leave each fall, but Wellfleet’s 3,100 year-round residents lend character to a town already rich with shops, restaurants, and spectacular seaside vistas. This Lower Cape community brings […]
