Primary Politicos

The latest configuration of the presidential primary season–we’ll be voting on March 7, the same day as California, New York, Ohio and four other New England states–makes the Massachusetts balloting […]

Joanna Lau remembers one of the first big defense industry meetings she ever went to, in the early ’90s. When she entered the room, she was the only woman in […]

Last fall’s Governor’s Council battles to confirm Margaret Marshall as chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court and the appointment of Francis Spina and Judith Cowin to the state’s highest […]

Deep in the heart of the vast, 175,000 square foot production floor at the Riverside Manufacturing Co. in New Bedford, where sewing machines clatter and pressing machines spew out steam, […]

BRAINTREE—It’s easy to get lost in the details of the 17-month political melodrama that rocked town hall here. There was, for instance, the town administrator secretly getting paid more than […]

Massachusetts has become increasingly dependent on foreign immigration for its labor force. The Changing Workforce: Immigrants and the New Economy in Massachusetts, a report by Northeastern University’s Center for Labor […]

Machines stamp, whir, and grunt loudly in Plant B of the Acushnet Rubber Co. in New Bedford. The stench of rubber fills the vast space of the century-old factory, as […]

With this issue, we are pleased to announce several changes in the staffing of CommonWealth. First and foremost, we welcome Robert Keough as editor. A distinguished journalist and researcher, Bob […]

Not quite a year ago, Eric Fehrnstrom wrote a remarkable mea culpa for Boston magazine. Entitled “The Other Side of the Hill,” the essay traced Fehrnstrom’s journey from political reporter […]

I write this nearing my 36th week of pregnancy, when words like “sleep” or “concentration” or “breathing” can only be uttered with derisive little quotation marks around them. Forgive me, […]

Is the American entertainment industry allergic to ethical reflection about its use of violent images? If so, what might the effects be on the nation’s youth? Such questions have become […]

Ed Moscovitch’s proposal for a statewide property tax to fund the costs of a basic education in each community in the Commonwealth has two important policy objectives: to sustain the […]

There’s a debate brewing over whether to change the state’s school funding formula. Common wisdom (as reported in The Boston Globe) is that the aid formulas in the 1993 Education […]

Each year standardized tests reveal that thousands of Massachusetts schoolchildren can’t read at basic levels and each year educators are pressed for solutions. But a Boston-based, national literacy program suggests […]

The first day of September was looking pretty good for Education Commissioner David Driscoll. As he sat that afternoon in the conference room adjoining his office, he could see something […]

There’s a move afoot in the Legislature to hike the salaries of the state’s six constitutional officers, who are now laboring at pay rates set six years ago. So CommonWealth […]

In most ways, it looked like just another day at the new federal courthouse in downtown Boston. On a recent afternoon in one of the cavernous building’s wood-paneled courtrooms, Judge […]

A little over four years ago, we set out to launch a new quarterly magazine about “politics, ideas and civic life in Massachusetts.” We had studied the publications of think […]

PREFACE.This is my last issue as editor of CommonWealth. It was my intention, believe it or not, to go out with something light and lively in this space. I wanted […]

Five Thousand Days Like This One: An American Family History By Jane Brox Beacon Press, Boston, 1999, 174 pages. One hundred years ago, Lawrence, Massachusetts, was known as the worsted […]