Marc F. Bellemare Posts

A few weeks ago I tweeted out that I had (re)discovered the Freedom app, and that it had allowed me to do a tremendous amount of work in the span of a few days.

If you are not familiar with it, Freedom allows blocking off distractions on your computer, phone, or tablet–or any combination of those things at once.

After reading Cal Newport’s Deep Work when it came out in 2016, I had used Freedom for a time. Back then, however, it was an all-or-nothing proposition: You either blocked off your Internet altogether, or you did not. But for a lot of what I do, I need to be able to access things like Overleaf, Google Scholar, and various other web resources,* so that a blanket ban on any and all apps and websites ended up being counterproductive.

Enter the new and improved Freedom, which allows to select what you block off for a designated amount of time. In my case, my most common distractions are Twitter, email, and news sites, so that is what I block off. The beauty of Freedom is that you can call up a session that blocks off all those things on more than one device. In my case, that would be my computer and my phone, so that when I sit at my desk, the only thing I can do is work.

After tweeting out about my rediscovery of the Freedom app, they asked me whether they could interview me about my work habits for their blog. Since this is neither about my book nor my research, I thought it would be fun to answer their questions. Here is the full interview.

* Here is Brians’ Common Errors in English Usage, my favorite such resource, in case you have never seen it.

This article, coauthored with Online Agricultural and Resource Economics (OARES) seminar co-founder and co-organizer Jeff Bloem, is now out in Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy. Here is the abstract:

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, we launched the Online Agricultural and Resource Economics Seminar (OARES) in an ostensible effort to maintain a semblance of normalcy in agricultural and applied economics. Our goal with the OARES was to break down the privilege barrier in two ways: by (i) featuring research mainly by junior, female, or minority scholars, and (ii) bringing frontier research to those who may not have had access to a regular seminar series prior to the pandemic. We thus discuss the contribution of the OARES to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in agricultural and applied economics.

You can find this article here (gated, but email me for a pre-print if you would like to read it but do not have access). This article is part of a two-article symposium, with the other article being about how Cornell’s Structural Transformation of African Agriculture and Rural Spaces (STAARS) program helped build research capacity among African scholars.

A few weeks ago I was interviewed by Buck Joffrey for his Wealth Formula podcast.

Over the course of our half-hour chat, we talked about the drivers of food crises, whether we are currently in a food crisis, what effect rising food prices will have on Americans, and whether we should expect social unrest–and where.

You can listen to the whole thing here (my segment begins at the 5:30 mark).