Not on the List: Reston Again Snubbed By Money Magazine's Best Places to Live

No need to roust Kasey Kasem from his unmarked grave in Norway this "spooky szn," as the kids may have said as recently as last year, as listicle-generating sweatshop Money magazine has once again failed to rank our plastic fantastic earth-toned community in its annual list of the Best Places to Live With Ample Off-Street Parking and Midscale Chain Retail.  

It's a tough pill to swallow. Exactly a decade ago, Reston was ranked #7 on this meaningless but fun list, but of course that was before the Great Unpleasantness. Just two years ago, we were kicking our Wegmans-curious neighbors to the west to the curb, and last year we had the best Zoom backgrounds for interminable "check-ins" anywhere in the country. But as a wise man once said, those days are gone. 

It gets worse. Adding insult to injury, our evil suburban Baltimore doppelgänger, Columbia Maryland, just beat Reston's all-time top ranking, coming in at #6 on this year's list. Apparently, the deciding factor was that they're finally getting rid of the shopping mall in the center of their planned community and replacing it with a fake downtown vibrant urban core. How... original! Making matters worse, the only Virginia communities to make the top 50 were Arlington and Alexandria. Why? They cited "Gatsby's Tavern" as the big entertainment draw for Alexandria, which,... come on. Obviously, the paid-by-the-click writers hired by Money have never enjoyed a truly rocking happy hour in a real fake downtown.

Oh, wait.