Jeremy Adam Smith

Essays, Articles & Stories

Recent Publications

  • How to Plant a Habitat Garden at Your Local Playground, Shareable.net

  • How to Teach Your Kid to Share, Shareable.net

  • Five Shareable Bridges: Designs that embody visions of a mobile, interdependent, open source world, Shareable.net

  • Wonder Men (Review of Manhood for Amateurs, by Michael Chabon), San Francisco Chronicle

  • Florida: Unsafe at Any Speed?, Shareable.net

  • Birds Do It, Bats Do It: New research shows how cooperation prevails across the animal kingdom. What can humans learn from other species? (with Alex Dixon), Greater Good

  • What Movies Make You Happy?, Greater Good

  • Not Everyone is Out to Get You (with Pamela Paxton), Utne Reader

  • Why Working Mothers Envy Stay-At-Home Dads, BusinessWeek.com

  • Father's Day Recommended Reading, Beacon Broadside

  • The Twenty-First-Century Dad, iVillage

  • The Daddy Identity Crisis (a Q&A with Lisa Belkin about The Daddy Shift), New York Times

  • The Daddy Brain, Greater Good



  • More or Less Greatest Hits

  • Jobless, but working, The Guardian

  • Same-Sex Marriage in Iowa and Vermon, Beacon Broadside

  • Beyond Sex and Violence, Greater Good

  • What happens when compassion hurts? (transcript of a talk for UC Berkeley Health Services), Greater Good

  • Why write books?, Beacon Broadside

  • America's Trust Fall: Trust is essential to strong relationships and a healthy society, but it has been declining for decades. How can America learn to trust again? (with Pamela Paxton), Greater Good

  • Why are all the Hapa kids sitting together?, Beacon Broadside

  • Truth in the Balance: An Interview with Psychologist and Author Steven Pinker, Greater Good

  • The Shelter of Each Other: Comfort in a Crisis, Beacon Broadside

  • A Dad's View of the Mommy Wars and Sarah Palin, Beacon Broadside

  • Playing the Blame Game: Video games stand accused of causing obesity, violence, and lousy grades, but new research paints a surprisingly complicated and positive picture, Greater Good

  • Same Street Twice, Instant City: A Literary Exploration of San Francisco (short story)

  • Living in the Gap: The Ideal and the Reality of the Christian Right Family, Public Eye

  • Playground Pioneers: Kids will destroy your life, but don't worry, parents: You'll get a new one, Greater Good

  • Altruism in Space, Greater Good

  • Fathering: The New Frontier, Mothers Movement Online

  • What Do We Want? When Do We Want It? Our Stories (short story)

  • Tearing Down the Towers: The Right's Vision of an America without Cities, Public Eye

  • Not Your Father's Captain America, Utne Reader

  • Parenthood: Inside vs. Outside, Mothering

  • The Freaks of Father's Day, AlterNet

  • “In 'The Ten Stupidest Utopias!', Jeremy Adam Smith runs down ten misbegotten utopias from Plato's Republic to the Internet itself, making fast and funny work of each.” - Cory Doctorow, Boingboing

  • The Ten Sexiest Dystopias, Strange Horizons

  • Smith’s analysis of science-fiction film [is] spot-on, incisive.” - Gregory Benford, Nebula Award Winner, Author of Timescape

  • Let a Thousand Magazines Bloom, Bay Guardian

  • Diversity in the bedroom, against all odds, San Francisco Chronicle

  • Fortress in Ruins, Pindeldyboz (Prose Poem)

  • Robota, or, How Hollywood Ate Science Fiction, Strange Horizons

  • The Failure of Fahrenheit 451, Strange Horizons /​ New York Review of Science Fiction

  • Guy Debord: Complete Cinematic Works, Cineaste

  • Robots Are Us: The Mystical Side of Science (and Fiction), SF Bay Guardian /​ AlterNet

  • Society of the Spectacle, The Nation

  • Thank You, Now Leave: Capitalism in the Czech Republic, Dollars and Sense



  • Praise for Jeremy's fiction

    “Jeremy Adam Smith’s ‘Three Creations’… is as at once beautiful and mythic… entertaining and thought-provoking.” – Lit Haven, reviewing issue 4 of Flytrap

    "[In "Pyramus and Thisbe,"] Smith delves deep into the emotion called love and also reveals its tragic shallow flaws when that emotion is driven by false assumptions. Overall, a strong story, even when Smith sometimes falls away from showing and goes into telling mode. But in this, I think he does so on purpose to give the tale an authentic, mythic feel. Possibly the best and most meaningful story in this issue, and well worth the read, despite its length." –Tangent Online, reviewing issue 9 of Apex Digest

    Praise for Jeremy's novella "The Wreck of the Grampus"

    Honorable Mention, The Year's Best Science Fiction (Tor, 2009), edited by Gardner Dozois

    Honorable Mention, The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy (Prime, 2009), edited by Rich Horton

    Honorable Mention, UNPLUGGED: The Web's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy (Wyrm, 2009)

    One of the best science fiction novellas of 2008 -Rich Horton, Asimov's

    "Jeremy Adam Smith’s wonderful 'The Wreck of the Grampus'... is a lengthy tale, perhaps 20,000 words, and every part of it is a pleasure to read. It presents wonder in its Neptunian coldness and shares valuable, if small, nuggets of warmth between its isolated, frustrated characters. Pym, the tale’s first-person protagonist, grows greatly over the story’s course, becoming both more human and more android as he develops (androids are no mere sub-humans, here; the trope of humanity’s traditional strength versus its creations is undermined by the revelation that the most developed androids possess a greater emotional range than any human)...I highly recommend this story." –The Fix Short Fiction Review

    'The Wreck of the Grampus' "is one of the best, if not the best science fiction story I have read this year... It has robots and deep philosophical questions and giant undersea creatures. Believable human characters, deeply human in their ways, and some deeply strange. This is a future that does not leave me cold like many post-singularity stories do, which are so common these days. In those stories, you can almost feel the silicon wrapped around you. Not here. There’s so much I want to say, so many surprising bits, but I don’t want to spoil it for anyone. I think it’s absolutely fantastic, and the author, Jeremy Adam Smith, and Eric Marin, the editor and publisher, should have as many kudos I can throw at them. This is damned good science fiction. Read it."–Jeremiah Tolbert

    A note: What's up with the science fiction?

    Most readers will come to this website after having first encountered me as a journalist who mainly covers family and fatherhood, plus politics. Indeed, that's how I make my living and how most people know me in the world.

    And so some may be surprised to hear that I also publish short stories, both conventionally literary stories and science fiction stories. The literary stories (here's one example) will probably seem perfectly respectable to most people. But the stories with androids and rocket ships? Not so much.

    I want to explain where I'm coming from, not out of defensiveness, but because I see this as an opportunity to evangelize.

    When most people think of science fiction, they think Star Wars and its literary relatives. That's fine; I enjoyed Star Wars when I was seven years old and I enjoy it now. I can't wait to watch it with my son, when he gets old enough.

    But there are other science fiction traditions.

    Firmly inside the genre, we have folks like Ursula K. Le Guin, Ray Bradbury, Samuel R. Delany, J.G. Ballard, and more--writers who are thoughtful, creative, and accomplished. Outside the genre, in what we like to call the mainstream literary world, Dorris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, John Updike, Jonathan Lethem, and Michael Chabon, among others, have all written science fiction stories, with varying degrees of success.

    The question is why. Why has science fiction become so pervasive? The reason, I think, is simple: Science fiction is the only branch of literature in which we can engage creatively with the technological and social changes that have shaped human lives for over three centuries, ever since the advent of the Industrial Revolution.

    In the face of technological upheavals that have ranged from mass production to flight to nuclear energy to space travel to the Internet to genetic engineering, human cultures have acquired special needs for catharsis, ethical debate, philosophical speculation, and imaginative play--all needs that science fiction tries to fulfill.

    That's why I think science fiction is important, and that's why I write it.

    Selected Works

    Nonfiction
    The Daddy Shift
    How Stay-at-Home Fathers, Breadwinning Moms, and Shared Parenting are Transforming the American Family
    Anthologies
    The Compassionate Instinct
    Essays on the Science of Human Goodness
    Are We Born Racist?
    New Insights from Neuroscience and Positive Psychology
    Essays & Stories
    Recent Publications
    "Entertaining and thought-provoking.” – Lit Haven
    Blog
    Daddy Dialectic
    “A really neat site” – Our Bodies, Our Blog “Thoughtful” – Washington Post