You may know that Boston’s most colorful nickname — the “Hub of the Universe” — originated not as a statement of fact, but a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the city’s self-importance. As any proper Bostonian will tell you, wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1858, the Massachusetts State House “is the hub of the solar system.”
More than a century and a half later, one latter-day Boston man is doing his best to situate the city at the hub of the modern world. Ian Coss is the host of “The Big Dig,” an award-winning podcast that demonstrates how Massachusetts has been central to some of the most vexing public policy issues of our time.
The first season of Coss’s series covered the Big Dig, the colossal, decades-long infrastructure project to reroute the I-93 Central Artery below ground. This huge undertaking lends itself to a question that’s far bigger: Why can’t America do big things anymore?
Season 2 of “The Big Dig,” “Scratch & Win,” showed how Massachusetts led the way (for better and for worse) in establishing the revenue stream of the state lottery system, opening the door in the process to legalized gambling.
And in season 3, Coss takes on natural resources. “Catching the Codfather,” which launched in February, explores the limits of government agency through the true crime saga of New Bedford fishing mogul Carlos Rafael, who beat an increasingly regulated system for years, until he took an ignominious fall.
Coss is an exceptional storyteller. With the patience of a dedicated middle school teacher, he breaks down the minutiae of legislation and institutional bureaucracy, making seemingly tedious subjects come to vibrant life. Working under the auspices of GBH, the Boston-based public broadcasting leviathan, Coss has become a trusted voice on a troubled media landscape. The honors “The Big Dig” series has amassed since its debut in late 2023 — a Peabody Award and a place on Time magazine’s list of the 100 Best Podcasts, to name two — attest to his success.
But that success hasn’t actually come by design, Coss admits.
“There was a time when I felt the localness of the show would be limiting,” Coss says, sitting in his compact studio on the second floor of the Medford house he inhabits with his wife of 10 years, Kelsey, and their Doberdoodle rescue, Cha Cha. “But I feel like the deeper we get into the world-building of Boston, I find the localness of it just makes it richer.”
As a supplement to season 1 of “The Big Dig,” this month Coss is embarking on a series of live tapings called the Highway Teardown Tour. In cities from New York to Seattle, he’s hosting conversations about the harm done by mid-20th-century urban highway construction. The tour hits the MIT Museum in Cambridge on April 28 and Providence (in conjunction with the Globe’s Rhode Island bureau) on April 30.
“Boston has an outsize mythology and presence in the national story,” Coss says.
He and his tiny team (producer Isabel Hibbard and story editor Lacy Roberts) are using Boston’s remarkable transformation in recent decades — from an aging, insular town dominated by machine politics into a “technocratic, cosmopolitan” destination city — as a test case. “The Big Dig” series shows how things work, and sometimes don’t, in today’s United States.
Coss, who is 37, attended a performing arts high school in Western Massachusetts and spent his undergrad years at Wesleyan University. He came to Boston to earn a PhD in ethnomusicology at Boston University.
While in grad school, he created a three-minute radio segment on a cross-cultural musical collaboration called the Nile Project. His professor helped him get the segment aired on the radio show “The World.” He heard it in a car on the way to his brother’s bachelor party.
“It was a thrill,” Coss recalls. Until that moment, he had not thought of radio storytelling “as a marketable professional skill.”
Soon, however, he was lining up gigs as an editor and sound designer. He worked on several successful shows, including Radiotopia’s “Ways of Hearing,” before independently producing his own first series, “Forever Is a Long Time.” That program — an exploration of his own family’s abundance of divorces — was named to several best-of lists for 2021, including those of The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic.
For “The Big Dig,” Coss seems to have caught a popular wave of big-picture analyses. Recent best-selling books such as Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s ”Abundance,” which argues that red tape is strangling innovation, and Mark Dunkelman’s “Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress — and How to Bring It Back” have addressed some of the same questions Coss is examining.
“There’s a larger, zeitgeist-y thing going on that I did not comprehend until now,” he says.
In any case, his series has clearly found its audience.
“The thing he does really well is he’s able to make the larger [issues] intimate,” says Nicholas Quah, who covers podcasting for Vulture and New York Magazine.
Quah sees Coss’s style of careful, audio-only storytelling as a throwback to the 2010s heyday of podcasting, before the medium got overrun by conversational programming — the Joe Rogans, Theo Vons, and Alex Coopers (“Call Her Daddy”) of the audio world.
“What Ian does cannot be consumed on YouTube or clipped and shared on social media,” Quah says. “It’s not built for that.” Shows like “The Big Dig” “feel like artifacts of a bygone era, and that’s kind of sad.”
Coss agrees that there is little chance for a show like his to compete on the same playing field as the mega-hosts that podcasting has created. There’s no comparison between his kind of storytelling — diligently reported and scripted, then recorded and edited, with musical beds that Coss himself creates using an array of guitars he keeps next to his desk — and the kind of attention-grabbing interview show in which “you turn on the mic and let it rip for three hours,” as he puts it.
Last summer Quah wrote a story about the recent wave of bad news for narrative podcasting, including Amazon’s dismantling of the production house Wondery (which it acquired for a reported $300 million in 2021), even as the general public has come to think of podcasting as the place you go to learn about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s engagement. It’s very difficult to judge which podcasts should be considered the best examples of the form, Quah argued, when the format itself is so ill-defined.
In podcasting’s earlier years, narrative programs such as “Serial” and “S-Town” emerged as instant classics, with real-life mysteries that engrossed listeners. There’s still great work being done — “Noble,” “Empire City,” and Jad Abumrad’s deep dive into the musical legacy of Fela Kuti, to name a few. Bostonian Brendan Patrick Hughes has just been nominated for a Peabody for his 10-part Apple series “Divine Intervention,” which recounts the history of the young Catholic radicals who sabotaged the draft during the Vietnam War.
In the fall, Coss will roll out season 4 of his series, which will focus on the endless debate about health care in America and the legacy of former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. Coss is no longer worried about running out of Boston-based ideas for his series.
“Bureaucracy” may sound like a dirty word, he says. “But it can actually be really fascinating if you look closely and dig into the human drama.” (One colleague has described “The Big Dig” as “‘The Wire’ for public radio.”)
Despite the turmoil in his chosen medium, Coss sees hope for the future. Podcasting grew out of radio — “the most transient, least archived” form of media, he notes.
Will listeners still be discovering a quality podcast like “The Big Dig” in 10 or 20 years? It’s hard to say whether fans will want to revisit their favorite scripted podcasts, as they would a beloved book or movie.
“We’re not used to audio as something you return to,” says Coss. “But I want to believe that podcasting has that potential.”
James Sullivan can be reached at jamesgsullivan@gmail.com.