Dishing the dirt

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 […]

WEST SPRINGFIELD — Every town has one — the captious critic who angrily insists that local government is being run by a band of incompetents. Most often the gadfly is […]

By Massachusetts law, Spy Pond is defined as a “Great Pond.” But to those who are well acquainted with the pond, it’s not as great as it used to be. […]

An environmentalist in the city Not so many years ago, Gregory Watson learned more than he ever thought he’d need to know about dairy farming. As commissioner of the Massachusetts […]

Home builders, highway planners, and hamburger vendors who have catered to America’s appetite for sprawl for half a century can’t seem to acknowledge why a growing number of their customers […]

As a native of the Midwest, I am often struck by the close, dense urban lifestyle of the Boston area. But density is only part of the New England landscape. […]

Sprawl. The subject is coming up everywhere from Al Gore’s presidential campaign to back yard barbecues in the state’s booming ‘burbs. Old-timers in just about any community in Massachusetts can […]