Peter Kadzis

WGBH News, Politics Editor Emeritus

[Foreign Policy @ForeignPolicy]

A war of choice has turned into a strategic disaster for Washington. https://t.co/r1kHhENBEM

[CRB Classical 99.5 @CRBClassical]

Philip Glass' newest symphony, an homage to Abraham Lincoln, was supposed to premiere at the Kennedy Center — until it didn't. And then, the Boston Symphony Orchestra stepped in:
https://t.co/RDsGmf2cTi

[Peter Kadzis @Kadzis]

@JamesWHankins1 Yes.

[Caitlin Flanagan @CaitlinPacific]

Tissue of scandals becomes heavyweight Harris tweed of scandals

[Peter Kadzis @Kadzis]

@CaitlinPacific Well said. — A Maine voter

[Scott Stossel @SStossel]

"Lenin’s ghost would be similarly unimpressed with contemporary American socialism—too much democracy, too little murder. "

https://t.co/Cj11x6dMwL

[Gintautas Dumcius @gintautasd]

🗳️🗳️🗳️

Ballot questions! Bills flying through the State House! A primary and midterms looming!

We're going to tackle all those things and more in a relaunched weekly WBUR newsletter, Mass. Politics

Sign up here 👇

[Peter Kadzis @Kadzis]

@gintautasd Yes!

[Peter Kadzis @Kadzis]

Bostonians read this story.

[Sue O'Connell: COMMENTATOR, not a reporter @SueOC_NBCBoston]

A violent night in Boston.
Early reports say at least two people were killed and 13 people were shot across the city. Every shooting is an assault on a neighborhood.
Every victim has a family whose life is different now.
The honest conversation is not “Boston is safe” versus “Boston is a war zone.”
Both slogans do a disservice to the city.
Citywide, Boston is still near historic lows. Through June 28, before this weekend’s violence was reflected in the weekly data, BPD reported 10 homicides this year, compared with 21 at the same point last year. Shooting victims were down from last year and below the five-year average. Shooting incidents were also down.
Boston had 24 homicides in 2024. Last year, it had 31. That is still one of the lowest homicide totals in recent decades.
That matters.
But citywide averages do not tell the whole story.
From 2018 to 2023, roughly 80% of shootings were concentrated in Dorchester, Jamaica Plain, Mattapan, and Roxbury.
About 4 in 5 victims were Black.
So when someone says, “Boston is safe,” the honest response is: safe for whom, and where?
A person in Beacon Hill can experience one Boston. A family in my neighborhood, Roxbury, can experience another.
The police staffing issue is real. Boston has a legal benchmark of 2,500 officers. The department is reportedly hundreds below that. Retirements spiked after 2018. Forced overtime and burnout are real public-safety problems.
But that is not the same as saying police hiring alone will solve concentrated violence.
More staffing may help response times, officer wellness, and basic coverage. That matters. But it does not, by itself, explain why shootings are concentrated in a small number of neighborhoods and networks.
The real question is bigger:
What are we doing before the shooting?
What are we doing after the hospital visit?
What are we doing for the young person most likely to be shot or to shoot?
Boston already has parts of the answer: hospital-based violence intervention, community violence intervention, focused deterrence, neighborhood outreach, resident coalitions, youth jobs, housing stability, and economic investment.
Those programs need stable funding, real measurement, and long-term commitment — not one press conference after one violent weekend.
The questions for Boston leaders should be:
• Are we staffing police in a way that protects both residents and officers?
• Are we investing enough in violence prevention in the neighborhoods where shootings are concentrated?
• What funding is guaranteed when federal violence-prevention dollars disappear?
• And are we building housing, jobs, opportunity, and trust in Roxbury, Mattapan, Dorchester, and every neighborhood carrying the loss?
The victims deserve more than slogans.
Boston can be safer than it used to be and still unsafe for the families living closest to the violence.
Police officers can need support and still not be the whole answer.
Public safety is response, prevention, trust, and investment and needs to be sustained for years, not just argued for one news or election cycle.

[Michael Tracey @mtracey]

This was, and remains, the correct assessment. The sheer omni-directional madness of the Ukraine War, now in its 53rd month, is severely underrated. Putin's madness in invading begat the madness of "Western" interventionist zealots. Result: ceaseless calamity for all involved

[Dan Kennedy @dankennedy_nu]

OMG, people, get ready: On Tuesday, Media Nation will present the 27th annual edition of the New England Muzzle Awards. We're calling out the forces of repression and naming names. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox for free: https://t.co/ec7uGkJjQl

[The Harvard Crimson @thecrimson]

Harvard professor Danielle Allen's push to replace Massachusetts's partisan primaries with a top-two system is closer to the November ballot after the state's highest court rejected a legal challenge last week.

@uybpham and @alexa_m15_s report.

https://t.co/TMTzKcu86B

[Peter Kadzis @Kadzis]

@philosway A motto to live by.

[Jonathan Lemire @JonLemire]

"But the boring reality may be that different places have different politics; all of these candidates are suited to their particular contests

"What’s happening in Brooklyn doesn’t necessarily tell us what will happen in Texas" https://t.co/0hpRXr8mIc

[Peter Kadzis @Kadzis]

@reason That’s not what she and a Republican colleague proposed.

[Peter Kadzis @Kadzis]

@NewYorker @SueOC_NBCBoston Yes. I’m reading it now.

[Peter Kadzis @Kadzis]

Wonderful, Sue.

[Sue O'Connell: COMMENTATOR, not a reporter @SueOC_NBCBoston]

My father Jack was born in 1918. He lived through the Depression. Two of his siblings died. His own father, a firefighter, died when he was a child. He grew up with his mother and six siblings. Then he went to France for WWII, came home, got married, became a father, and then a widower, and then a single father to my brother Jack. He would later meet my mom, and here I am.

He drove a truck. He was a Teamster. He wasn't a big man, but he was very strong and he never once walked away from a fight. He worked through a broken rib one time and a broken toe another. He was a practicing Catholic who taught me to be skeptical of the Church. He had a mischievous sense of humor, telling me the bells at Mass were rung to wake up the priest, a line I then repeated, loudly, at Mass, to a great deal of laughter.

He took me places kids didn't go back then. He'd come home for lunch and let me play in the back of the truck, or I'd ride shotgun on his errands. It was, as they say, a different time. One winter we got stuck in a snowstorm not far from the house, and rather than walk the rest of the way, he steered us into a bar, where we stayed for four hours until my mother came and found us. She was not happy. My favorite thing in the world was running errands with him on a Saturday. Getting the car washed. We had our share of disagreements, too, especially over TV and movies. He was no fan of F Troop or Blazing Saddles. I was.

The deepest thing I ever understood about my father happened in the South, in the early sixties.

I had a doll named Johnny. Johnny was a little Black doll, and how I came to have a Black doll in the early 1960s is a story for another time. I was more of a tomboy and not a doll kind of girl, so I'm sure my parents thought it was a phase. It wasn't. I took him everywhere. After a while, I think they forgot Johnny was Black at all.

We were driving through the South. It was summer, and it was hot. My mother knew that part of the country well. She'd lived in North Carolina and gone through the South and Southwest working for her uncle's rodeo in the 1940s. We stopped at a roadside restaurant, and the manager told us we couldn't come in if I brought the doll.

I remember my father's face. He was not a man marching for civil rights. But the absurdity of turning a whole family away over a child's doll shocked him. My mother, who would normally have been the one to fight, said quietly that we should just find somewhere else. My father said no. We were going to be served. The manager told him the doll stayed in the car or we took the food to go, and then he called my father a Yankee.

We ate in the car with the windows down in the heat, because there was no air-conditioning, and my father spent the entire meal naming, in detail, exactly what kind of stupid bastards and asinine idiots we had just met.

My dad wasn't out there with Dr. King. But the absurdity stayed with him, and because it stayed with him, it stayed with me.

He also handed me a rule that I use regularly.

In middle school, a neighborhood boy, who was also a friend, wrote my name on a wall and called me a slur. I came home and told my father. He walked over to the boy's house, found the boy's father, and told him to send the kid over to apologize to my face, because if it was worth writing on a wall, it was worth saying to me directly. The boy came to my house and apologized.

To this day, when someone comes at me from an anonymous account online, I tell them the same thing. Say it to my face. And I'm careful to do the same. Every time, it's my father talking.

Happy Father's Day.

[gregg krupa @greggkrupa]

🇺🇦 #ResistPutin and his 🇺🇸 allies...

Bozo from Queens
@GOP
@Heritage
37 percent of american voters...

suicide of a superpower!

volodymyr zelenskyy LEADER OF THE FREE WORLD. 🌎🌍🌏

#SlavaUkraïni

🗽

[A.A.Milne @A_AMilne]

Pooh and Piglet walked home thoughtfully together in the golden evening, and for a long time they were silent. ~A.A.Milne

#SummerSolstice2026
#SummerSolstice #longestday #sun #stonehenge

[Confucian Classics @UnwobblingPivot]

We must discriminate sounds in order to know the airs; the airs in order to know the music; and the music in order to know the character of the government. Having attained to this, we are fully provided with the methods of good order. (BR, Yue Ji 5)