IndyMass: April 9, 2026

A roundup of recent articles from the Massachusetts independent press

Read on for some of the best recent articles by local independent news outlets around the Bay State! Includes IndyMass #57.

ARTS
Classical Music Commentary: Boston’s Lost Opportunity — How the BSO Board Chose Charles Munch over Leonard Bernstein
The Arts Fuse (Somerville)
A really interesting deep historical look at how the Boston Symphony Orchestra lost its way long ago and apparently never really recovered its mojo.

FOOD
The Open Door reports “dramatic rise” in food pantry visits, following statewide trend
The Local News (Ipswich)
Bad news for the third year in a row from a major North Shore charity serving 11 communities. Gosh, one might think that something was terribly wrong with our nation’s priorities. But, naaaah, that couldn’t be it! (Yeah, it is, though …)

GOVERNMENT
Petition Calls For Special Town Meeting, Vote of ‘No Confidence’ In SPS School Committee
Sudbury Weekly
The kind of weird tempest-in-a-teapot fight that municipalities with town meeting governments seem to excel at generating.

HISTORY
Could the Strathmore have been saved?
The Shoestring (Western Mass.) and the Montague Reporter
A sad tale well told. The long slow death of a storied paper mill and the local economy it took with it.

POLICE
Were they off-duty or on the public’s dime? Cops who turned out for arraignment violated BPD policy or state law
The Flipside (Boston)
Boston cops break laws to support another cop charged with manslaughter. Not a good look.

PARKS
Mary Cummings Park: One of the Best Kept Secrets in Burlington
Burlington Buzz
So secret, I’ve never heard of it. And I’ve drove through Burlington really fast hundreds of times back in the day lol …

WAR
The innovators of Kendall Square are going to war or escaping to Europe: A conversation
Cambridge-Somerville Independent
An important and disturbing interview with Theodora Skeadas, a person qualified to speak on such matters, about the dangerous shift among Kendall Square university facilities and corporate labs from creating pharmaceuticals that can help people to building war tech—following changes in research funding under the Trump administration.


IndyMass is produced for BINJ.News, the independent weekly magazine of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, by Jason Pramas and is syndicated by BINJ’s MassWire news service.

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