Boston Magazine has a funny definition of 'Boston'

It's the only school on the list that gets to make incoming kids take a test and then only take the top N% of them (it's around 10% of the kids in the district, right?). The other schools have to take all the kids. Talking about MCAS is nonsense. If the kids couldn't pass MCAS, they wouldn't be let into BLS. The other high schools have to let in kids who couldn't pass MCAS.

Given the fact they get to skim the cream, Boston Latin does a mediocre job educating kids. 15% of the kids they send to AP tests blow it? It's like they make them dumber.

It would be nice if Boston had a truly excellent public school, something like Stuyvesant or Thomas Jefferson High. Boston as a city might be too small for that, though. It would have to be regional.

I think it was number 46 last year.

Because nobody outside the area cares or knows about anything other than Boston.

If you ran into someone who lived somewhere within 50 miles of Dallas you would hear "Dallas". If you met someone who lived within 50 miles of St. Louis? "St. Louis".

Because nobody knows the detailed geography of suburban anywhere but their own city - and Boston is one of the few places where people get upset about that.

lol

Was in LA and a girl said she was from Boston. So naturally I ask where since I'm Roxbury born and bred, and this chick says Barnstable *sigh*. Like I tell my Everett partner, if your mayor is not Marty and your police department isn't BPD then it isn't Boston my love

I always used to get a kick out of that while spending summers in Martha's Vineyard as a kid.

issue, but it didn't really work like that in my section. No food / drink staff, let alone a single writer, can make a defensible choice based on an exhaustive survey of the whole scene. Even in a small greater-city area like Boston, it's too much to take in within a year, never mind revisiting old favorites to see if they're still holding up their standards.

I was writing the weekly On the Cheap column for the Boston Phoenix at my time contributing to BoMag, and still feel good about the awards I suggested and they mostly used for things like modest neighborhood restaurants / bars, traditional Vietnamese joints, street foods and fried chicken. I also had major roles in nominations (and did many of the write-ups) for the annual Best-of food and drink awards issues at The Phoenix, Stuff Magazine, and The Improper Bostonian.

You can't taste / drink everything, but certain staffers have their furrows or neighborhood lore, so you farm out pieces to them. Many took my approach of trying to direct readers toward worthy contenders they might never find on their own without a semi-pro food geek's obsessive exploratory instinct and time invested. There ain't much new value is pointing out that a $100-a-head meal at certain broadly-hyped, Beard-awarded places will probably be worth your investment (though they all do that, too.) My own prior suspicion as an amateur that ad sales influenced award choices was belied by my experience at all of them. None of my editors were Andelman-style nutsack-polishers for cash. (NB: not trying to shame sex workers, just noting the toil is not undertaken out of actual love.)

I often smile to think about the owners' likely perplexity after one of my reviews or awards was published: "Where did all these white people come from, and why are they all ordering the same six things?" I'd revisit a place a few weeks after a review, and note that they hadn't bothered to post a laminated copy of my rave: they and their regulars didn't read us. (Exceptions: my yellowing 2008 Phoenix review of Taqueria El Amigo is still on their wall, which warms my heart every time I go, ditto my 2007 Dig Boston review of my local, J.J. Foley's Cafe, from when they first started serving food.)

RIP, Poppa B's, Packy Connor's, Pepper Pot, Xinh Xinh, Terrie's Place, Beijing Star, Pupuseria Mama Blanca, O Senhor Ramos, Griyo Lakay, Las Ventas, the original Tawakal Halal Cuisine, Victor's in Saugus, Jasmine Taste of Persia, Lorenz Island Cuisine, Thai North when its menu included traditional Northern Thai cuisine, Trattoria Toscana, Brookline Family in its Turkish era, Jasmine Bistro (Hungarian / French / Balochistani!), and many other family-owned, neighborhood-oriented, often out-of-the-way places I made it a point to review because they all did at least one extraordinary thing that few of my peers or our readers had bothered to notice. (Boston Speed's Famous Hot Dog Wagon, Strip-T's in the Timmy Maslow era, and Rino's Place eventually got broader media attention and long lines, but I gave them their first adoring professional notices.)

Such places are the overlooked backbone of our dining scene -- what makes Greater Boston a far more thrilling place to eat than you might guess if you only dined at the mid-priced to fancy dining places within five miles of the State House that get most of the local food-media coverage. I'm soul-crushed these days, knowing many of them may not survive the current unforgivable, eminently avoidable shit-hurricane in which we now live.

Too bad it's a fallen world.

Duh!

How can you keep those people from draining your precious tax dollars if you can't live in a community segregated from them?

gets my vote.