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.
☁️Cooler and cloudier with a slight chance of rain and highs in the 40s. Sunset is at 6:46 p.m.
A corgi photoshoot on the Charles River Esplanade yesterday. See more of Arthur Mansavage’s photos from the first warm day of 2026 here.
Days after the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s board announced it was parting ways with musical director Andris Nelsons, the orchestra’s musicians put out a statement saying they “strongly oppose the decision by the Board of Trustees to end the appointment of Maestro Nelsons.”
“The musicians believe in Andris’s vision for the future,” they said in a statement.
Neither the orchestra nor Nelsons has said why Nelsons is leaving. Some fans, like Seth Mascolo, said they were shocked and saddened to hear the news. “My reaction was: this cannot be. I cannot be reading this,” Mascolo said. Others, like Sean Park, said the orchestra needs a new leader. “We need an innovator, a risk-taker, a flash of inspiration that can lift the BSO back into the spotlight,” Park said. (CRB Classical 99.5, which is part of GBH, is the radio broadcast partner of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. No one from CRB or the BSO reviewed this coverage prior to publication.) You can read more reactions from fans in Marilyn Schairer’s full story here.
Four Things to Know
1. The family of Emmanuel Damas, a local Haitian man who died in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Arizona last week, is still looking for answers about what happened to him, said City Councilor Ruthzee Louijeune, who spoke with Damas’ 80-year-old mother this weekend.
Damas had been in ICE custody since September. His family said he complained of a tooth infection for about a month before his death. “There is absolutely no reason why someone should be dying from a toothache. The harm of this administration knows no bounds. He was a member of our community,” Louijeune said yesterday.
2. Boston’s city government is offering more support for immigrants who live in the city: help getting legal services and navigating the citizenship process, mental health services and English classes.
The initiative’s funding, a total of $4.5 million, will come mostly from private donations from The Boston Foundation, United Way of Massachusetts Bay and the Barr Foundation, which will contribute a combined $3.1 million. Another $1.3 million will come from the city budget. “The people of Boston founded this country on the principles of community and freedom for everyone, and those are the principles we are continuing to fight for,” Mayor Michelle Wu said.
3. New research shows that slightly fewer people in Massachusetts are smoking since the state banned flavored cigarettes (like menthols) five years ago. Researchers with the Department of Public Health and University of Illinois at Chicago estimate that the 1.4% decrease in the number of smokers over the last 5 years means that fewer people will need medical care for smoking-related complications, saving state residents $70 million over 5 years and $200 million over 10 years.
It’s part of a larger trend: the share of adults who smoke cigarettes in Massachusetts has fallen from 14.7% in 2014 to 8.8% in 2024, and the share of adults who vape fell from 6.2% in 2023 to 5.6% in 2024. Researchers also said they found no evidence that the ban affected the number of retail stores selling tobacco, how many people they employ or those employees’ wages.
4. The people behind the Ig Nobel awards, the satirical ceremony celebrating scientific research that sounds silly but can also be useful and illuminating, announced that they’re moving their annual ceremony from Cambridge to Zurich. The Annals of Improbable Research has hosted the ceremony in Cambridge and Boston for the last 35 years, but last year four of 10 honorees decided not to travel to the U.S. to collect their award in person.
“During the past year, it has become unsafe for our guests to visit the country,” master of ceremonies Marc Abrahams told The Associated Press. “We cannot in good conscience ask the new winners, or the international journalists who cover the event, to travel to the U.S.A. this year.” Abrahams said the awards will be held in Zurich every even-numbered year, and will travel to different cities on odd-numbered years. Annals of Improbable Research staff are still planning a celebration in Boston about three weeks after the ceremony in Zurich this September.
Catching the Codfather: A day at the fish auction
By Ian Coss, host of The Big Dig and Catching the Codfather
When you’re doing reporting or documentary work, you get used to people saying “no” a lot. I get it; who needs a stranger with a microphone poking around. But then there are the other times, when the answer is yes, come on in, and you find yourself wandering into a strange new world, asking…should I be here right now?
That’s how it was with the Whaling City Seafood Display Auction.
In Episode 5 of “Catching The Codfather” we go inside the auction house, where the vast majority of New Bedford’s seafood is unloaded and sold. And I want to emphasize up top that even though this series is about a case of fishing fraud, I have no reason to believe any of the people I spoke to or photographed for this piece have done anything illegal. They were incredibly gracious in letting me watch them work; my goal was simply to understand the process.
The auction house is built right at the water’s edge, with this large opening like a door to nowhere. It’s one of the rare places on the waterfront where you can actually get a clear view across the harbor to Fairhaven, with no piers and boats in your way. The place is quiet when I arrive, but the shoreside crew is already milling around. They know a boat is expected at any moment. It’s called, appropriately, The Fisherman.
Once the boat is tied up, the crew is free to go. The “lumpers,” as they are known (including Chris Silva below), head down into the hold to unload the fish by hand. Interestingly, the lumpers in New Bedford are still represented by a union today, even though the fishermen’s own union was marginalized after the strike we covered in episode two. And in case you’re wondering, that giant fish at Chris’s feet is a halibut; they can get a good deal bigger than that too…
The captain, Paulo Valente, tells me that he has about 60,000 lbs. of fish on board, mostly cod and haddock. It takes several hours to unload it all, sort the fish by species and size, and pack it all into crates.
The next morning I return bright and early for the actual auction, which today looks nothing like the process I described in Episode Two. Now it’s all on a computer, with most of the buyers bidding remotely from their own computers. Exactly one buyer did come in person (with a laptop for placing bids), so that he could inspect the fish before deciding what to bid on. We all sit around in this nondescript room and watch the numbers go up on the screen; not nearly as exciting as the old days. Note the final price on this haddock — just $2.70/lb for the whole fish right off the boat.
Later that same day I caught up with Valente, the captain of The Fisherman. He was back on the boat, mending nets and getting his permits straight for the next trip. He hoped to be back out at sea within a couple of days.
Stay tuned for our final episode next week – “It’s Your Job to Catch Me.”
Listen to the latest episode of Catching the Codfather here, and catch up on the full series here.
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