Annalisa Quinn is an editor at the Boston Globe magazine, and through a mixture of good fortune, good journalism and good writing, she published the perfect story for our times last week.

On 31 August, a lesbian bar in western Massachusetts called Last Ditch posted on Instagram that ‘it is with love we inform our immuno-compromised disabled divas we will be opening Saturday nights as mask optional’. Previously, KN-95 face masks were the minimum level of protection required to attend the bar at all times.

The owners were swiftly accused of being eugenicists. One commentator said: ‘People like you kill disabled people in the name of your own leisure and convenience.’ Another wished the venue to be firebombed. Last Ditch attempted an apology. It wasn’t good enough, since they posted an Instagram card without alt-text for the visually impaired. Two of the three founders had left the business, one to enrol in clown school. The remaining founder, Jackie Matellian, began to cry under her mask in a meeting. Soe Noire, a black lesbian who goes by ‘he/him’ pronouns, said Matellian’s crying was ‘racist’, and demanded payment to keep going to ‘community meetings’.

What does a bar have to do with your identity? The answer, of course, is everything

What does a bar have to do with your identity? The answer, of course, is everything

Everyone found it funny, even on Bluesky. The Boston Globe got an extra thousand subscribers in the 24 hours after it posted the story. This was wokeness at its most defeated, its most exhausted. You don’t need to combat it with defunding, anger or debate. You just need........

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