As waters rise, coastal residents are increasingly facing a difficult choice: try to relocate in a difficult housing market and take losses on their homes, or get comfortable with a future where there may be multiple feet of water in their living rooms.
CW in Depth
Posted inCourts, Religion, State Government
Massachusetts cities and towns have spent millions restoring historic religious sites. They don’t know if it was constitutional.
FOR NEARLY two centuries, the Acton Congregational Church has stood serenely in the town’s main square, its pews offering a welcoming haven for spiritual renewal and quiet reflection. Starting in 2016, however, it became the focal point for a closely-watched court battle over the separation of church and state. On the church’s clapboard front, a […]
Posted inEconomy
A race to keep up – or to the bottom?
MARCH WAS “Problem Gambling Awareness Month” in Massachusetts, but for those in charge of the state lottery the gambling problem coming into the new year was that people weren’t doing enough of it. The lottery was seeing flat or declining sales in many of its games during the last half of 2022, which represented the […]
Posted inEconomy
A race to keep up – or to the bottom? Lottery bets big on $50 scratch ticket, online games.
MARCH WAS “Problem Gambling Awareness Month” in Massachusetts, but for those in charge of the state lottery the gambling problem coming into the new year was that people weren’t doing enough of it. The lottery was seeing flat or declining sales in many of its games during the last half of 2022, which represented the […]
Posted inEconomy
Could Boston face an ‘urban doom loop’?
AT FIRST, the emptying out of downtown Boston office buildings looked like a seismic, but temporary, reaction to a once-in-a-hundred-year pandemic. Once we got a handle on the mysterious new virus ravaging the globe, the initial thinking went, things would more or less return to normal. But we are now coming to terms with a […]
Posted inArts and Culture
Broadening theater’s reach
RODNEY KING’S BEATING at the hands of Los Angeles police officers in 1991, their subsequent trial and acquittal, and the days of violent unrest that followed came 15 years before Samuel Adedeji was born. But seated last month in a darkened Cambridge theater, the Boston teenager was suddenly transported into the middle of the tinderbox […]
Posted inBook Review
Reimagining a mutual aid society
WHEN SARA HOROWITZ got her first job as a labor lawyer at a firm in 1994, she writes, she assumed it “would come fully loaded. Benefits just came with a job after all, and I assumed mine would include health insurance, a retirement plan, and the protection of basic labor laws. I assumed that a […]
Posted inEducation
Are exam schools really an academic promised land?
AFTER MONTHS OF debate amid heightened attention to racial justice issues, the Boston School Committee approved sweeping changes on Wednesday night to admission rules for the city’s three selective-entry 7-12 grade exam schools aimed at increasing diversity in their student populations. The school committee voted to revamp admission standards in a way that will have […]
Posted inHealth Care
2017 birth control provision fell through the cracks
IN 2017, amid growing concern that Congress and the Trump administration were moving to limit free access to contraceptives, the Massachusetts Legislature passed and Gov. Charlie Baker signed into law a bill guaranteeing access to birth control without copays. One of the provisions in that legislation, dubbed the ACCESS law (for Advancing Contraceptive Coverage and Economic Security in our […]
Posted inRace/Racism
Why are Latinos so overrepresented in the state child welfare system?
LAST MONTH, workers from the state Department of Children and Families knocked on the door of Raquel, an El Salvadoran immigrant living in Worcester. DCF had gotten an anonymous call about a fight between her husband and her teenage son. Since then, Raquel, speaking Spanish through an interpreter, said she has struggled to communicate with DCF workers, often because of the language barrier. DCF sometimes has an interpreter available, but not always. She […]