(The Atlantic) – In March, I put my iPhone into a yellow cardboard box with MO stamped on top—the M looked like a riff on the Motorola logo; the O looked like a flower. Over the next several weeks, I left my phone there for roughly 23.5 hours out of every day.

I did so as a participant in “Month Offline,” which started last year in Washington, D.C., as a kind of Dry January challenge, but for smartphones. Now it is a fledgling business with a footprint in New York City. Members of each monthlong “cohort” pay $75 for the experience, during which they swap their iPhones for a lower-tech device and participate in weekly meetups. I joined the cohort that began on March 2 and received an email just before the first meeting: “Excited 2 see u soon,” it said. (Read More)