Take a deep dive into the stories that shape Massachusetts with CommonWealth In Depth.
In these thoroughly researched long-reads, CommonWealth Beacon peels back the layers behind the big headlines and spotlights unseen stories around the state by digging into complex legal challenges, thorny policy fights, and compelling personal narratives.
When the river rises
By 2050, severe floods that were expected to happen once every 100 years will be three times more likely to occur in the Connecticut River Valley in Massachusetts. But the uneven distribution of resources across municipalities leaves some towns less equipped to plan for and respond to disasters.
Betting (on) the farm
The latest data from the US Agricultural Census show more than 100,000 acres of farmland in Massachusetts have been lost since 1997. That’s an average of losing just under 15 acres of farmland a day, roughly double the rate of farmland loss nationwide.
‘Water doesn’t know property lines’: Where Massachusetts’s climate and housing crises meet
“The state rules have to catch up with the reality of climate change,” said Matthew Fee, a Nantucket select board member. “A town road can’t be abandoned if someone’s [living] on it, but what happens when the road goes into the ocean?”
Mass. education secretary’s votes reflect growing Democratic hostility toward charter schools
Growing Democratic opposition to charter schools was cast in sharp relief at February’s state education board meeting, where Gov. Maura Healey’s education secretary, Patrick Tutwiler, voted against all five proposals for expansion of charter schools.
‘It’s not going to be pretty’
Immigrant advocates have good reason to think New Bedford may figure prominently on a list of places that will be targeted under an aggressive deportation campaign by the new Trump administration.
Post-Bruen decision, everyone has to be a gun-law historian
The decision has opened almost all aspects of the state’s gun safety law regime to challenge and sent lawyers scrambling for history books. As recent Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decisions have shown, if a policy is not tied to a founding-era law or practice – a so-called historical analogue – it likely will not survive…
Why are so many amendments being withdrawn on Beacon Hill?
A lawmaker gets up to make a speech, notes how important it would be for his or her colleagues to pass the amendment, and then withdraws the very amendment that was supposed to be so important.
Lessons to learn from Oregon on psychedelics ballot measure
A group called Mass. for Mental Health Options has gathered the necessary signatures to put a question on the November ballot that would make it possible for Massachusetts residents to do the same. However, the measure in Massachusetts is much more expansive than the one that legalized psilocybin therapy in Oregon in 2020.
Seeking a right to medical aid in dying
Margaret Miley is frustrated, in pain, and dying. But Massachusetts has thus far resisted the movement, now law in nearly a dozen other states, to allow patients near their end of their life to obtain medication that would hasten their death.
“Who benefits from this?” she asks.
In wake of pandemic, Mass. achievement gap has widened
As schools try to recover the learning loss students experienced in recent years, a study by researchers at Harvard and Stanford universities shows that the achievement gap separating poor and non-poor students in Massachusetts has widened more since the pandemic than in any of 15 states they studied.
The bomb-tossing bean counter
Not even halfway through her first term as auditor, Diana DiZoglio has essentially returned to the campaign trail. She is lobbying voters, and emptying her own campaign coffers, to support an initiative she wants to put before voters this November.
The last of Somerville’s old guard
Corruption cases, and attempted prosecutions, were once regular headlines in Somerville. The recent bribery conviction of a one-time local power broker, with echoes of another era, came and went without much fanfare.
Is tutoring the answer to pandemic learning loss?
Tutoring has a stronger base of solid positive evidence than almost any other school intervention, but joins lots of other innovations in education that seem to offer great promise but have been stubbornly difficult to implement at the kind of scale that would really drive population-wide improvements.
Boston schools grudgingly release some sexual misconduct data
The numbers, which were released grudgingly after a six-month public records battle, begin to paint a picture of how prevalent sexual misconduct, bullying, and biased-based incidents are in the Boston schools.
Yes, building more housing does lower rents, study says
Does increasing the supply of housing, even if it’s mainly higher-cost, market-priced units, temper the runup in costs that has so many residents straining to make ends meet? The idea follows the basic economic principle of supply and demand – when more of something is made available, its price falls. But there are plenty of…
‘Re-wilding’ Massachusetts cranberry bogs
As Massachusetts’ famous cranberry industry consolidates and some of the cranberry bogs fade out of use, famers, governments, and conservationists are increasingly eager to start “re-wilding” them to natural rivers and wetlands.
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