Roger W. Smith is a writer and independent scholar based in New York City. His experience includes freelance writing and editing, business writing, book reviewing, and the teaching of writing and literature as an adjunct professor at St. John’s University.
Mr. Smith's interests include personal essays and opinion pieces; American and world literature; culture, especially books and reading; classical music; current issues that involve social, moral, and philosophical views; and experiences of daily living from a ground level perspective.
Sites on WordPress hosted by Mr. Smith include: (1) rogersgleanings.com (a personal site comprised of essays on a wide range of topics) ; (2) rogers-rhetoric.com (covering principles and practices of writing); (3) roger-w-smiths-dreiser.site (devoted to the author Theodore Dreiser); and (4) pitirimsorokin.com (devoted to sociologist and social philosopher Pitirim A. Sorokin).
ICE arrests Canal St. vendor in ‘targeted operation’ right after NYPD raids
By Nicholas Williams and Rocco Parascandola
New York Daily News
November 22 2025
I observe vendors from time to time in Manhattan: on the streets, in parks, and on the subway. They are, from what I have experienced, unobtrusive and “harmless.”
Selling knockoff handbags is a serious crime?
People should not be terrorized and locked up for trying to make a living.
Catholic teaching exhorts exhorts nations to recognize the fundamental dignity of all persons … To our immigrant brothers and sisters, we stand with you in your suffering, since, when one member suffers, all suffer (cf. 1 Corinthians 12:26). You are not alone!
— United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) Fall Plenary Assembly. Baltimore, MD. December 12, 2025
I took a course on Shakespeare with Professor Aileen Ward in my freshman year at Brandeis University. She was an outstanding professor and lecturer. I also attended a reception once in her apartment in Cambridge, which I have not forgotten.
I wish Professor Ward had been able to complete her biography of Blake, and hope that someday someone may be able complete it.
Posted here:
Aileen Ward, introduction, The Poems of William Blake (The Heritage Press, 1973)
booklet accompanying Heritage Press edition
interview with Aileen Ward, Bookllist, June 2003
Aileen Ward, “Who Was Robert Blake?” (Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, Winter 1994/95)
“I wish every American who out of ignorance or worse curses immigrants as criminals or a drain on ·the country’s resources or a threat to our ‘culture’ could have been there. I would like them to know that immigrants, many of them having entered the country illegally, are making sacrifices for Americans that many Americans would not make for them.” — John McCain
with a friend from high school. This led to an exchange of emails between us.
I wrote the following:
There is something about music — this is often true of popular music — that it embeds itself in your brain so that you recall exactly how it sounded when you first heard it and what your state of mind was at the time.
It was a Saturday night in 1956 (I think), and my older brother and I were watching the Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey show on TV. Elvis Presley, whom we had both never heard of, sings “Heartbreak Hotel.”
Johnny Cash sings “I Walk the Line” on another show.
The Diamonds “Litle Darlin’,” probably on American Bandstand; and “A Teenager in Love” (Dion and the Belmonts, who were — how would I have known it then? — from the Bronx, a place I never heard of.).
Richie Valens “Oh, Donna.” Such direct emotion, which I could only experience vicariously then
In junior high, in the lunchroom, there is dancing. Paul Anka’s “Put Your Head on My Shoulder.” Kids dancing close.
I am in the sixth grade in our barbershop on Mass Ave. An Elvis song is playing on the radio: “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You.” If only I could be another Elvis.
I am transported back fully to my state of mind as a preteen at the Agassiz School in Cambridge, and our house near Harvard Square. My emotions, then, my “worldview” (such as it was), my yearnings.
When I went to a Pat Boone movie in Harvard Square and heard him sing the tacky song “April Love” and flip hamburgers in a cookout scene while wearing a chef’s hat (and crooning). Me in my bedroom in Cambridge hearing Pat Boone’s hit “I Almost Lost My Mind” on the radio over and over again. I was doing something like playing a card or board game with myself or flipping through magazines — Sport magazine (not to be confused with Sports Illustrated) was a favorite of mine. Also fan magazines about Elvis and other rock stars which I bought at the Montrose Spa on Mass Ave.
