Modern fictions

On the website for the journal Algebra and Number Theory, one finds the following remarkable statement:

ANT publishes high-quality articles of interest to a broad readership, at a level surpassing all but the top four or five mathematics journals.

I have no problem with ANT, but shoving this self-assessment down people’s throats strikes me as deeply silly. We can probably all agree that the top five journals are (in some order) JAMS, Annals, Inventiones, Publ. IHES, and Acta Mathematica. So ANT is claiming to surpass Compositio, Duke, Ann. Sci. ENS, Cambridge J. Math, etc. Hmm…

Thanks to [redacted] for pointing this out to me.

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