The October 11 New Yorker features a review of current thinking on procrastination from James Suroweicki, and I’m pleased to note a brief nod to Freedom. The article is based on a new collection of essays on procrastination, edited by Chrisoula Andreou and Mark D. White. It is refreshing to read an article on procrastination that doesn’t get lost in causal claims about technology or how different everything is nowadays.

Last weekend’s Financial Times magazine also contained mention of Freedom. The author Katie Roiphe describes an experiment spending a week offline. Roiphe writes:

A man I meet at a party tells me about a software program called “freedom”. It asks you how long you would like to be offline (i.e. free) and you tell it, and then it disables your computer so you can’t get on to the internet for that time – or, in its words: “Freedom locks you away from the internet.” If you should suddenly need to go on the internet, you can restart your computer and disable the program, but it offers that extra bit of resistance; it is the superego, the self-control that you don’t quite have, or in its own slightly Orwellian terms, “Freedom enforces freedom”.

I’ll refer you to the article to see how the week offline goes.