It’s Thursday, September 24. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Bishop Robert Barron on the pioneering priest who could become America’s next saint. Masih Alinejad on the women who were blinded by the Iranian regime, then found their voice. Joe Nucci meets his AI therapist. All that and much more.
But first: The brawl over the most famous bar in America.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Three friends walk into a “Covid-cautious, gender-inclusive, anti-carceral, anti-profit lesbian bar.” It’s no joke. It’s an actual bar, specifically Last Ditch in Greenfield, Massachusetts. It’s also the subject of a viral article in The Boston Globe about a smear campaign by patrons who claim that the bar betrayed its mission and morals.
What was the bar’s crime? Relaxing its mask policy so that the queer ladies who come to Last Ditch to, um, drink can do so sans face coverings for one night a week. This is one of those stories that truly must be read to be believed. It includes a three-hour community meeting, accusations hurled by someone named Moss, and the phrase “WHITE THEY THEM TEARS.” To understand what it all means, you will need Katie Herzog, who delves deeply into Last Ditch in her podcast Blocked and Reported.
“When Last Ditch announced this policy change online,” Katie writes for us today, “you would have thought from the comments that they had lubed up their stripper pole with the blood of particularly cute baby seals.” Lately, I’m hearing that woke is over, since some champions of way-out-there progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are now waving off that era like it was just an embarrassing teenage phase. “Woke 1.0 was crazy,” AOC told ABC’s This Week last month.
Not so long ago, even using the word crazy might have been seen as ableist and an insensitive microaggression against the mentally ill. But what happened at Last Ditch shows that Woke 1.0 never ended in some parts of America. It just got crazier.
—Suzy Weiss
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Bishop Barron: Is This America’s Next Saint? |
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Fulton J. Sheen, the priest who hosted a nationwide radio program and then a prime-time television program with an audience of 30 million, will be beatified by the Catholic Church today in St. Louis. That will put Sheen just one step away from sainthood. His pioneering push into new forms of evangelizing influenced a generation of American Catholics, including Bishop Robert Barron, who writes that his own ministry was inspired by Sheen and explains how his “cultured depth and media savvy” lives on in our hyperdigital era. | |
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The Women Blinded by Iran |
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The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood is a fiction classic that warns of a dystopian patriarchal regime. But for Masih Alinejad, who grew up in Iran and was forced into exile, the book felt like a warning she had already been living inside her whole life. Today, with the regime’s leaders in New York for the UN General Assembly, she tells the story of two women whose sight was stolen by the Iranian regime’s brutality after they refused to give up their most important weapon: their voice. | |
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AI Therapy Worked for Me. It’s Not for Everyone. |
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Can AI help me? For simple tasks, the answer often is a resounding yes. But what about healing trauma? After psychotherapist Joe Nucci was assaulted, he asked a chatbot to help him. To his surprise, it worked, and he explains why for us today. Could it do the same for others? Read his piece for the answer. | |
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