# The Most Famous Bar in America. Plus. . . Canonical: https://brew.new/templates/substack/the-most-famous-bar-in-america-plus Brand: substack.com Category: newsletter ![Preview of The Most Famous Bar in America. Plus. . .](https://cdn.brew.new/email-preview-5f0c7610ffa2f483-tracking_r57mqahywdw2pbgtbtx0fzmaqn8f1dd6-1790252494904.png) ## Email content Forwarded this email? Subscribe for more The Front PageThursday, 09.24.2026View in App Upgrade to Listen Get the whole story. Join now.The Most Famous Bar in America. Plus. . . Is this TV evangelist our next saint? Masih Alinejad on the Iranian women blinded by the regime. Your chatbot therapist will see you now. And more. “After years of covering idealistic, politically progressive, and often queer institutions that collapse under the weight of staff or customers’ demands, to me, the story of Last Ditch is a familiar one,” writes Katie Herzog. (Photograph by Sophie Park) By The Free Press 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. ADVERTISEMENT 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 What Happened at the Long-Covid Lesbian Bar?Katie Herzog • Culture and Ideas What Happened at the Long-Covid Lesbian Bar? Read story › Bishop Robert Barron • Faith Bishop Barron: Is This America’s Next Saint? Bishop Barron: Is This America’s Next Saint? 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. Read story › Masih Alinejad • International The Women Blinded by Iran The Women Blinded by Iran 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. Read story › Joe Nucci • Tech and Business AI Therapy Worked for Me. It’s Not for Everyone. AI Therapy Worked for Me. It’s Not for Everyone. 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. Read story › ADVERTISEMENT Claude helps diagnose equipment, translate for crews, and log every job. Learn More MORE FROM THE FREE PRESSEXCLUSIVE: ‘The New York Times’ Sued by Shareholders Over Biased Israel Coverage Maya Sulkin Read story They Were Lifelong Democrats. Then a Terrorist Attacked Their Synagogue. Olivia Reingold Read story Pastor Ezra Jin: Free My Fellow Church Leaders in China Ezra Jin Read story THE NEWS Harvey Weinstein appears in Manhattan criminal court for sentencing in the sexual assault of Miriam Haley on September 23, 2026. (Steven Hirsch/Pool via Getty Images) Disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein was sentenced on Wednesday to 15 years in prison for his criminal sexual assault conviction last year. At the sentencing hearing, a former production assistant said that she “often felt like I was the one on trial.” Weinstein repeated his claim that he is innocent. Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian called Iranians “victims of terrorism” in a defiant address at the United Nations General Assembly. After seven months of war, Pezeshkian said that Iran was “ready for dialogue and diplomacy and negotiations” but would never “bend the knee.” A federal judge seemed skeptical of the White House press ban during a hearing on Wednesday, but didn’t immediately strike down the ban on CNN, MS NOW, and Politico. He said he would rule as soon as possible. In 2018, the same judge threw out the White House’s ban of CNN correspondent Jim Acosta. Only 26 percent of Americans said Trump was right to impose new tariffs on Canada last month, according to a Politico poll. Fifty-six percent of Americans and 83 percent of Canadians said the move was wrong. Canada responded to the tariffs with its own tariffs earlier this month. The son of Israel’s ambassador to the United States was in critical condition on Wednesday after a car-ramming attack in the West Bank denounced by his father as terrorism. Ambassador Yechiel Leiter said that his son Neria, who was serving as a reservist, “needs a miracle” to survive. Neria’s oldest brother also was a reservist when he was killed in Gaza in November 2023. “Packaged kratom” was found during the investigations of two University of Mississippi students who may have died as a result of drug overdoses. Kratom, an herbal drug with opioid-like effects, is banned in Oxford, Mississippi. Fraternities and sororities warned their members about cychlorphine, a synthetic opioid that isn’t detected in fentanyl test strips. ADVERTISEMENT Luis Galarza and Laura Gutierrez founded SoFlo Solar to restore solar power for homeowners left with broken systems after installers went out of business. Claude helps them diagnose equipment across manufacturers, translate for crews, and log every job. Learn More COMMENT LIKE SHARE DOWNLOAD AS A PDF Become a paid subscriber Get access to our comments section, special columns like TGIF and Things Worth Remembering, tickets in advance to our live events, and more. UPGRADE TODAY Download on the App Store © 2026 The Free Press 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104 Unsubscribe [Open and remix this design](https://brew.new/templates/substack/the-most-famous-bar-in-america-plus) [Browse email designs](https://brew.new/browse/templates)