Contributors

This month, food editor

Scott Kearnan makes his
Boston debut with our 2018
Top 50 Restaurants pack-
age [page 72]. Considering
our city’s dining scene is
buzzier than it’s ever been, Kearnan and
his team went beyond the criteria of small
plates and superior service to finalize their
rankings, ultimately weighing how well
each spot fulfilled its mission—and
unpacking what the restaurants say about
the city as a whole. “The dining world is
probably one of the best entry points for
telling larger stories about Boston’s culture
and the people who make our city tick,”
Kearnan says.

Over the course of her

career, lifestyle reporter
Erica Corsano has met her
share of “imposters”—or
would-be socialites so des-
perate to be accepted that
they exaggerate their life story—but so far,
she’s never encountered anyone more
audacious than Sager Kopchak. In “The
Impossibly Perfect Life of Sager Kopchak”
[page 96], Corsano unpacks the story of the
now-infamous Winchester resident who
defrauded an acquaintance out of a million
dollars after also lying to him about under-
going cancer treatment. “Faking cancer,
when many of us have had people we love
die from this truly awful disease?” Corsano
asks. “That’s next-level.”

In a city renowned for its

world-class medical profes-
sionals, why is it so hard for
patients to get face time
with physicians? So asks
health writer Jamie
Ducharme, who addresses Boston’s notori-
ously long waitlists for office visits in “The
Doctor Won’t See You Now” [page 23]. “I
had seen some of the studies around wait
times in Boston, and I knew that it was a
problem,” Ducharme says. But it wasn’t
until she started digging into the data after
her own three-hour wait for an urgent-
care appointment that she realized just
how convoluted patient-processing could
COURTESY PHOTOS

be. “Fixing it isn’t as simple as training

more doctors or tinkering with one or two
little things,” Ducharme says. “It’s really
going to take some systematic changes.”

BOSTONMAGAZINE.COM 19