Philadelphia Magazine's "The Next Great American City," from their December issue, is a lovely piece. Written by Tom McGrath, the mag's look at Philly's spirited ingenuity—leading the way in WiFi, gay-friendly marketing, Starr/Stein restaubars—was solid. We would've liked to have seen the inclusion of the Fringe Festival, the worthiness of Philly's indie rock, hip-hop and electronic music scenes and Philadelphia Style, the latter the first true look-see into Philly's fashion-forward retail outlook for the 21st century. But you can't have everything.

From editor-in-chief Larry Platt's perspective, the piece was about the harmonic convergence of all that's good here and how it suddenly warranted and garnered national attention. The story's inspiration came via an autumn visit from a college pal of Platt's: an upstate New Yorker who hadn't been to our city since the mid-1990s. "He was stunned by the vibrancy," said Platt. The last time he was here Rendell had just started the Make It a Night campaign to stop after-dusk Philly from looking like a ghost town. "We both realized that wasn't so long ago," laughed Platt.

Still, several notions of "cool" that appear in McGrath's "How Philly Got Hot" timeline stood out as impure. Many were strictly media constructs, like the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation's 2003 ad campaign ("Get your history straight and your nightlife gay"), the arrival of MTV's The Real World and the recent New York Times story heralding Philly as New York's "Sixth Borough."

"I think Tom makes a good argument—that sure, these are media constructs," says Platt, "but that they're also metaphors for a sort of welcoming, innovative, open town—a tolerant town that heretofore hadn't been part of Philadelphia's national reputation."

They're trying to deconstruct a media construct. OK. But what about the fact that one of those constructs—that "Sixth Borough" story was written by its most recent hire, writer-at-large Jessica Pressler? Why not acknowledge her authorship and the shit she received for crafting said construct? A Pulse item from the month before had already done that, Platt explained. "At some point, you stop going into the inside baseball of the piece."

Platt is kicking himself about one exclusion: Philly's inclusiveness. "I just got back from Boston and I could not find one black face all weekend. I know we talked about diversity. But we could've hit harder that part of the vibrancy on our streets comes from different looking people inhabiting the same space."