My View of the Village

By Roger Paradiso

The Amma Pop Up Shop: Supporting Global Humanitarian Aid at Integral Yoga

Sosie Hublitz, executive director of Integral Yoga Institute in New York, and I talked about an important event taking place this month at their location on West 13th Street. IYINY is proud to host a very special Mom and Pop-up shop supporting Ammas’ Global humanitarian initiatives through their Embracing the World charity.

You can discover a thoughtfully curated collection featuring artisan jewelry, wellness and body care products, books, handcrafted treasures from around the world, vintage deities, exquisite chocolates and many other unique gifts. One hundred percent of proceeds support Amma’s Global Charitable Network, helping provide food, shelter, healthcare, education, disaster relief and other essential service to people in need around the world. For more information, please call 212-929-0585 or visit iyiny.org.

---

NYPD releases image of Greenwich Village rape suspect

As reported by CBS New York, July 8, 2026

The NYPD has released new pictures of a suspect wanted in a sexual assault in Lower Manhattan. Police said the man pulled a knife on a 21-year-old woman before raping her near West 10th Street and Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village on June 27. The suspect later fled. The victim was transported to a local area hospital in stable condition.

Anyone with any information is asked to call the NYPD’s Crime Stoppers hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477), or for Spanish,1-888-57-PISTA (74782). You can also submit a tip via their website or via DM on Twitter, @NYPDTips. All calls are kept confidential.  

The Village View thanks the police for handling this with care and we extend our love to the victim.

---

NYU’s 2026 commencement at Yankee Stadium.

As reported by MEHR KOTVAL for Washington Square News.

Washington Square News printed an opinion piece on suppressing free speech during a recent graduation. Here are some excerpts.

The shift to prerecorded remarks is part of NYU’s larger strategy of limiting political expression from students, and it demands pushback before it becomes permanent.

The end of the NYU experience for the class of 2026 felt more like a controlled exit than a graduation celebration. As higher education faces escalating attacks from the federal administration — norms of academic freedoms erode, students are politically targeted for deportation and schools with diversity initiatives face threats of funding losses — NYU’s priorities lie not in responding to controversy, but in sanitizing speech and minimizing dissent at its largest and most public event…

Commencement is the only time the university is fully gathered in one space. It is supposed to be a celebration of students and what makes their class special — not a curated performance, carefully stylized to reflect the university’s preferred image of the graduating class. By getting affinity graduations more or less restored, students have shown that voicing their disapproval loudly can force the university’s hand. It was only when students started a campaign to fight the cancellation of affinity graduation, which threatened the brewing of another PR nightmare, that NYU reinstated them — albeit using a new name to save face. This is the first year of prerecorded graduation speeches, and every year this custom continues, it will become more normalized and harder to reverse…

Students must demand the restoration of live student speeches before prerecorded ones become a precedent. ….Vocalize your support and dissent loudly in your cheers. Or, as students did the last two years in protest of President Linda Mills’ leadership, simply walk out — during the prerecorded speeches…. This is one of the only moments the university is watching, fully attentive to its public image and therefore most responsive to collective student pressure. Our visibility creates a rare point of leverage, so it is important to make that attention count.

Read the entire article online. Opinion: Defend student speech at graduation before it disappears – Washington Square News.