This is a web edition of GBH Daily, a weekday newsletter bringing you local stories you can trust so you can stay informed without feeling overwhelmed.
⛅Mostly sunny and below freezing, with highs around 31. Sunset is at 5:27 p.m.
The snow has stopped, but schools in the Boston area are closed for another day. While kids stay home (or settle in with a neighbor, grandparent or family friend) there are plenty of people across Massachusetts still going to work.
“It’s part of the deal,” Boston Medical Center general surgery resident Colton Yahn told GBH’s Jeremy Siegel yesterday, while walking in the snow and wind after an overnight shift. “But we love what we do, so we’ve got to do what we can to get into work and get home safely.” A nurse at BMC told Siegel that the hospital offered to put employees who are working during the storm up in nearby hotels. “I just don’t want to be driving,” she said. Keep reading for a lovely collection of snow photos from our newsroom.
Four Things to Know
1. At President Donald Trump’s State of the Union Address tonight, Rep. Seth Moulton will bring Marcelo Gomes da Silva, the teenager from Milford who was detained for six days last year by federal immigration agents. “When he was detained for days on end, without a bed, without a blanket or a pillow, without even being given a Bible when he asked, he focused on others,” Moulton said.
Others, like Sen. Ed Markey of Malden and Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Boston, will boycott the address and instead go to an event called “The People’s State of the Union” on the National Mall. Pressley said she will use the event to talk about how the Trump administration’s mass deportation operations are affecting children. “Families are terrified to leave their home, and children are terrified they will return home from school to find their parents taken,” she said. “This White House has ripped parents away from children, deported families with vulnerable infants and imprisoned hundreds of children in Texas.”
2. The snow means that services for seniors are on hold as people dig out from the storm and wait for power to return, though the organizations who spoke with GBH News all said they delivered extra meals before the storm. “It might be another couple of days for delivery because there’s a lot of power lines down,” said Maryanne Ryan, CEO of Elder Services of Cape Cod and the Islands.
In Malden, Lisa Gurgone of Mystic Valley Elder Services said the organization’s Meals on Wheels program is also on pause. “That’s the problem with these big storms like this — the first day, I think, people can prepare,” she said. “It’s the second day ... where everyone else goes back to work, and these people who are older and are homebound, it’s still hard to get to them.”
3. Ukrainian people in the Boston area today are marking four years since 2022’s Russian invasion of their country. “We couldn’t imagine — I personally couldn’t imagine — that something as huge as war in a European country .... would last for as long as four years,” said Daria Bogatova, who cofounded the nonprofit Mriya to help people in Ukraine during the war.
Bogatova said Ukraine has been at war her whole adult life: she was 15 in 2014, when Russian troops invaded Crimea. “Looking at that now, I think it’s crucial that next generation will not experience that,” Bogatova said. “Next generation has to live without war, for generations to come.”
4. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution researchers and archivists found an almost 77-year-old recording of a humpback whale call, taken on a research vessel off the coast of Bermuda in 1949. It was part of a collection of recordings marked with notes like “fish noises” and “whoop whoop fish.” You can listen to the recording here.
WHOI Director of Research Data and Library Services Ashley Jester said she believes it’s the oldest recorded whale call still in existence. “[In] 1949, after World War II, the U.S. Navy had figured out that sonar was really important, but we still didn’t know a lot about how sound traveled underwater — the physics of it, how it was impacted by depth and salinity and temperature,” she said. “They were out doing basic research about how sound propagated underwater.”
Photo Essay: Boston in the snow
GBH’s Arthur Mansavage captured a snowy city during yesterday’s blizzard. Here are a few of his shots.
A snow-coated stoplight outside the Boston Public Garden.
A person traversed the streets on cross-country skis.
It’s never, ever too cold for a coffee run.
See more of his snowy photos here.
Dig deeper:
-Dave Epstein: The snowstorm of ’26 was a record breaker. Here are the totals around Boston.
