The Common WBUR

Late Wednesday night, a protest encampment created by students at Emerson College was forcibly removed by police. Over 100 protesters were arrested in the clearing, and multiple injuries have been reported. Meanwhile, other encampments have been erected on campuses across the city as students call for, among other things, a ceasefire in Gaza, that schools cut ties with Israeli funding and support of pro-Palestinian student groups that have been suspended from campuses like Harvard.

WBUR Senior Education Reporter Carrie Jung joins The Common to discuss the students' demands and how the city and campus communities are responding to this latest phase of protest.

Greater Boston’s daily podcast where news and culture meet.

April is Earth Month, which is a time to reflect on the one planet we have and for a lot of us that’s an opportunity to discuss climate change, and how it’s affecting our communities.

Throughout the month we featured weekly conversations with some of the people in Greater Boston working to build our region’s resilience in the face of a changing climate.

Our final guest for these Earth Month discussions is Leslie Jonas, an Indigenous land and water conservationist and an elder eel clan member of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe.

Greater Boston’s daily podcast where news and culture meet.

More electric vehicles are hitting the streets in Boston, making it one of the biggest EV markets in the country. However, adoption still lags behind similar metro areas across the country and experts worry that the growing number of EVs is still not enough to help the state reach its emission goals.

WBUR Senior Business Reporter Zeninjor Enwemeka joins The Common to explain the barriers to more EV ownership in Massachusetts, and what the state is doing about it.

Greater Boston’s daily podcast where news and culture meet.

In late March, the MBTA announced it would be paying an additional $148 million to the Chinese locomotive manufacturer CRRC, in hopes of pushing the company to complete its order for desperately needed T cars by 2027. The order, which was made in 2014, was for 404 new T cars to be delivered by September 2023. To date, the MBTA has only received around 130 of those cars and with this latest payout, the total deal between the agency and CRRC is now valued at over $1 billion.

Just last week, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, or SEPTA, canceled its $185 million dollar contract to buy passenger rail cars from the same manufacturer, CRRC. The railway cars were expected by last year. So far, SEPTA hasn’t received a single one.

Today on The Common, we look at these two very different approaches to a similar problem with transportation reporters from Boston and Philadelphia: Tom Fitzgerald from The Philadelphia Inquirer and Taylor Dolven from The Boston Globe.

Greater Boston’s daily podcast where news and culture meet.

Alvin Campbell, an alleged serial rapist, was arrested in 2020 on sexual assault charges. A new investigation by WBUR finds that at the time of his arrest, Campbell had already been reported for multiple allegations of rape and sexual assault dating back to 2016.

He is the brother of Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell. Her office said the attorney general recused herself from any involvement in the case. In a statement, Andrea Campbell said the prosecution has her “unreserved support.”

For the past year and a half, WBUR reporter Walter Wuthmann has been investigating the case against Alvin Campbell, and why he was not arrested earlier as allegations and DNA evidence against him surfaced.

Wuthmann joins The Common to discuss how the culture of our criminal justice system and Massachusetts' secrecy laws obscure cases of sexual assault from the public in ways that often ends up protecting perpetrators instead of victims.

Greater Boston’s daily podcast where news and culture meet.

Massachusetts legalized recreational cannabis in 2016. According to the state, the industry here has grossed nearly $6 billion from hundreds of dispensaries across the state.

As part of WBUR's Field Guide to Boston, a series aimed at helping folks better connect with the region, and in honor of the unofficial cannabis holiday on 4/20, we want to offer a quick guide for those who are curious about cannabis in Massachusetts.

So The Common team took a trip to Heritage Club in Charlestown, Boston's first recreational dispensary owned by a Black woman, Nike John. She walks us through her experience working in the cannabis industry as well as the dos and don'ts of buying weed responsibly.

Greater Boston’s daily podcast where news and culture meet.