Steel drums, flag-draped floats, and the smell of jerk chicken filled Brooklyn’s Eastern Parkway on Monday, as hundreds of thousands turned out for the West Indian Day Parade, one of the largest celebrations of Caribbean culture in the country.

This year, Haitians marched under more solemn circumstances than in prior years. Federal immigration enforcement has intensified against Caribbean and other Black immigrant communities over the past year, and Haitians have lost a key protection — temporary protected status. Known as TPS, it let hundreds of thousands remain in the U.S. legally.

Organizers say the parade has become both a defiant assertion of pride and a rare bright spot in a traumatic year.

Happy Tuesday in New York City, where the discourse around the upcoming 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks is getting ugly.

In the past few weeks, a number of prominent Republican officials and some victims’ families have called on Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is Muslim, to stay away from the commemoration ceremony scheduled at Ground Zero for this Friday. A petition circulated by family members has gathered nearly 100,000 signatures urging Mamdani not to attend. A number of prominent Republicans, including former governor George Pataki, have also called on the mayor to skip the event.

The controversy escalated last week when former mayor-turned-Trump ally Rudy Giuliani went on Newsmax and said he was “offended” by the prospect of Mamdani attending the ceremony. “They have every desire to dominate us,” Giuliani said, referring to Muslims. “That’s what they’re taught from the day they begin their extremist religious education. Mamdani is a clear supporter of that.”

For his part, Mamdani has made clear that he intends to be at the ceremony on Friday. “I want this week to be a focus on…the families whose loved ones were stolen from them 25 years ago in the horrific act of terror of September 11th. And a focus also on the first responders who gave everything they could to this city and to the people who came together to try and help their fellow New Yorkers,” Mamdani told reporters.

Former presidents Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, as well as Vice President J.D. Vance and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, are also expected to attend.

Since this is back-to-school time, you can bet that somewhere right now a professor is printing out an AI policy on the first page of a syllabus, underlining “prohibited” and trusting detection software to enforce the ban. But the software doesn’t work, at least not reliably. It never has.

Here’s what they are missing. You can’t keep AI out of a classroom, and the harder you try, the more you’ve stopped teaching and started policing. Students have already decided whether the machine should be part of how they think. The only question left to a professor is what to do about it.

In my opinion, the premise is backwards. A classroom is supposed to prepare students for the world they’re about to enter.

Read on to learn more.

The PREMIUM tag indicates articles that come with extra photographs or special coverage. Thinking of a subscription? Try us out with a day pass for just 99 cents. No long-term commitment for a subscription.

Got a tip? Send it in to [email protected].