Podcasts about Massachusetts, United States

On BPR Full Show 4/7: Trump Threatens Iran, the hosts of Boston Public Radio Podcast open the phones on a House bill that would ban social media for anyone under 14. The invitation is half joke, half civics lesson: "Stop scrolling. Use your phone for the purpose it was meant for." The phone lines misbehave. Then a caller they identify as Stephen in Quincy gets through. They describe him as a 20-year listener calling for the first time, and he asks who social media is really designed for.

That small scramble is a fair picture of how Massachusetts sounds in its own podcasts. The talk is participatory and argumentative, and some of it happens in rooms where the audience can answer back.

Sport is the loudest of those rooms. The Red Sox finished their regular season 87–75 in September 2026. In October 2026 the Patriots beat Buffalo 29–26, a week after losing 35–6 at Jacksonville. The feeds track every swing:

• Not Another Sox Podcast posted CLINCHED! feat. @soxbart | S26E36 in September.
• Missing the Point caught the football mood with MTP Boston: The Patriots Panic; Maye, Vrabel and the Buffalo Horizon.
• In July, Garden Report | Celtics Postgame Show from TD Garden ran INSTANT REACTION: Boston Celtics TRADE Jaylen Brown to 76ers.

Under the scores sit quieter arguments about schools, public money and who decides. WBUR reported another decline in MCAS results in September 2026. Questions like that surface, in smaller form, in a school committee budget or a select board vote. Some of the shows below are about Boston.

What Massachusetts is

Massachusetts is a New England state in the northeastern United States, with Boston as its capital, and it was one of the original thirteen colonies. The Census Bureau's July 2025 estimate put its population at about 7.15 million, on 7,800.96 square miles of land measured in 2020. Higher education, biotechnology, information technology, finance and health care are important to its economy and identity.

The civic room

Boston Public Radio Podcast. Jim Braude and Margery Eagan host from the Boston Public Library in the episodes heard here. Their best stretches mix stakes with house comedy. In BPR Full Show 3/12: How To Load The Dishwasher, the hosts read a Globe report in which their own boss, Susan Goldberg, talks about a possible GBH–WBUR merger. Then they replay an older exchange in which she declined to answer them. Later the same show settles, with total conviction, that plates go "large, small, large, small."

The Culture Show Podcast. Jared Bowen's show follows in the same library studio, and it is most useful when culture turns into economics. In its April 17, 2026 episode on Hampshire College closing, a panelist runs through small colleges that merged or closed because they relied on tuition rather than endowments.

The Fabulous 413. This show hears the same campus from inside. On April 14, 2026: Educating Aspects, a guest who co-taught at Hampshire describes a school that gave evaluations instead of grades, and students who never shied from controversial opinions.

WBCA Podcasts. These come from a Boston community radio station. Its Voices Of Madison Park Podcast is a school pep rally with a labour-market argument inside it. Mr. Norris, who places students in co-op jobs, says he has watched probably 50 or 60 of them go from the electrical shop into the union, many of them first generation in the country. The episode's closing includes "MP Pride. MP Love. MP Family."

Town and state government. Away from Boston, the civic audio becomes literal.

• Ashburnham Select Board Meeting Podcast posts meetings. In 11-6-2023 - Ashburnham Select Board Meeting, a speaker explains why rail trail language sends the town into a MassDOT scoping meeting, and worries aloud about being bumped by another town's project.
• AWRSD School Committee Meetings Podcast lets you hear a budget assembled line by line in 2-10-2025 - AWRSD School Committee Meeting, including a teaching position reduced because only three kindergarten sections remain.
• AM Quincy gives Rep. Tackey Chan title billing in Rep. Tackey Chan - April 1, 2026. A speaker says kratom is reminiscent of "bath salts."
• Incorruptible Mass is openly advocacy. In Stipend Reform, the speaker asks listeners to gather signatures and to "get ready to run for office."

The teams, argued at full volume

The Red Sox. These shows differ mostly in temperature.

• Boston Baseball packages WEEI audio. In Red Sox Review - Sox fall in St.Louis 3-2, one called strikeout on Yoshida becomes a verdict on the offence: "Pathetic. It was legitimately pathetic."
• Not Another Sox Podcast plays the same frustration for laughs. In The "B" Word | S26E12, with the team at 6-9, the hosts hand out "mustard" to players who earned it, Trevor Story among them.
• Pod On Lansdowne earns its place with The Way Back, Wayyy Back Ep (ft. Jerry Trupiano). Trupiano, introduced as the Red Sox radio voice from 1993 to 2006, remembers seeing a model of a waterfront ballpark that never came to fruition. Then he declines to perform his old call one more time.

The Celtics. Coverage divides between reporting and memory.

• Locked On Celtics - Daily Podcast On The Boston Celtics, hosted by beat writer John Karalis, is the steadiest. In Boston Celtics LOSE, but Jayson Tatum WINS, while Joe Mazzulla keeps SECRETS, he quotes Tatum: "I just kind of wanted to walk off the court on my own two feet."
• Celtics Talk reaches back in SPECIAL EPISODE: Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the 1986 Celtics - Kevin McHale Interview. McHale remembers his hotel phone ringing at the draft in New York, and Red telling him about the Robert Parish trade.

The Bruins. Bruins Beat marks a first in Reacting to James Hagens Bruins Debut | Bruins Beat: Hagens' first NHL point, a secondary assist.

Crime, courts and the church

The most demanding listening here is Unholy Fathers, Crash Barry's series carried in the Fake Shaman feed. It concerns abuse and a child's murder within the Diocese of Springfield, and it is detailed and graphic. Barry builds his case from church documents and interviews.

• In the Fake Shaman feed's Unholy Fathers, E11 Richard Lavigne, Part 4, Barry knocks on Lavigne's door in Chicopee in 2019. Massachusetts law bars him from using the recording, so he narrates a verbatim account instead.
• In Unholy Fathers, E17 She was Haunted by a Bloody Priest, Part 2, also in the Fake Shaman feed, he follows a survivor he calls C through the diocese's intake process to a $10,000 offer. Of that offer she says she did not want to be treated "as if I was some kind of fender bender."

Other shows in this vein:

• Boston Confidential Beantown's True Crime Podcast revisits the stranglings of 1962 to 1964. Its host thinks the victims have been lost in a case that hit the press so hard.
• Crime of the Truest Kind gives Julie Murray room to explain how misinformation re-traumatises families like hers.
• RIGGEDLabs Podcast's description mentions the 2012 arrest of state chemist Annie Dookhan.
• The Salem Witch Trials Podcast reaches furthest back, through accusations against Susannah Martin that turned on dead cows.

Rooms with a past

Welcome to Provincetown. The main series dates from summer 2022, and it lasts because it lets people be more than a theme.

• In Welcome to Provincetown's Under The Rainbow, it is Carnival Week, and a crew hoists a ten-foot homemade tornado onto a dolly for a float down Commercial Street: "Don't let go of the tornado." The same episode rides along for the hour-long drive as Ethan goes for heart surgery.
• Welcome to Provincetown's Stacy Star Loves You spends a final day with Star before she takes the ferry home to sort out an apartment. Rent money and a leaving-early dispute with the program she came with are part of that day too.

Two Pints In A Corner. Dinky Dawson's show remembers a Boston club, the Channel, through the people who worked and played there. In 53 Dinky, Sean McNally, Chris Doherty Jerry’s Kids, Gang Green 54:06, Doherty, recovering from a stroke, tells how he and friends hid above a men's room ceiling tile to get into shows.

Radiotopia Presents. In 2025 the feed carried We're Doing The Wiz 1 - The Tofu Curtain. That series follows a rural Massachusetts performing arts high school after a 2004 racial controversy.

Where to start

• For hearing the state argue with itself: Boston Public Radio Podcast, BPR Full Show 4/7: Trump Threatens Iran.
• If small-town power interests you: Ashburnham Select Board Meeting Podcast, 11-6-2023 - Ashburnham Select Board Meeting.
• For a fan who likes reporting over noise: Locked On Celtics - Daily Podcast On The Boston Celtics, Boston Celtics LOSE, but Jayson Tatum WINS, while Joe Mazzulla keeps SECRETS.
• When you want people, not issues: Welcome to Provincetown, Under The Rainbow.
• Ready for difficult accountability journalism: Unholy Fathers in the Fake Shaman feed, Unholy Fathers, E17 She was Haunted by a Bloody Priest, Part 2. Listen for the gap between what the diocese offered and what C wanted.

The Massachusetts feed on this page plays clips from these shows.