Articles

I started publishing articles in 2005, initially more as a rather frivolous diary than a set of thought-out articles, of which I have left only a part online. As my interest in, and relative grasp of, code and web development grew, I also began posting about my experience in that area. I now write mostly about British and French politics and my ongoing journey as a coder. Everything of any length I have written is here, but, obviously, you can look me up on Twitter if you yearn for more frequent updates.

Politics

Politics are hardly a side interest, as can be seen from the articles collected here. I first indulged my taste for politics and current affairs at Oxford at the Oxford Union Society, and then as a student in Paris, where I was President of Conférence Olivaint.

Non-human animal rights: the categorical imperative of our time

I describe the cruelty of the modern factory farm, the framework legitimising dominion by man over non-humans, the evidence that animals have the ability to feel pain and pleasure, and suggest a philosophical framework to make them citizens.

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Brexit: time to move on

The time has come for us as a country to plan our future in the new trading and political context for which the Government has received an unambiguous mandate, after four years of relentless and hysterical debate over the merits and demerits of Brexit.

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Brexit would be constitutional and economic suicide

There is a way out of the unprecedented crisis in which the UK has been plunged by the Brexit referendum: constitutionally, the result does not bind the Government or Parliament

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The absurdity of Brexit

The Conservative case for Remain: from a British perspective, the case for continued membership of the European Union, with the numerous opt-outs secured by the UK, is overwhelming

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Pooling Anglo-French defence: a sign of progress, or of decline?

Pooling Anglo-French defence: a sign of progress, or of decline?

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Can the Fifth Republic survive M Sarkozy?

The dangerous path on which France's once admirable institutions have been taken over the past few years has just reached a new low with even the existence of Cabinet solidarity apparently forgotten by the current administration.

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What should a Tory government stand for in 2010?

Following the General Election the important question will be what a Tory government will actually stand for. There would a lot to be said for it refocusing on its traditional values

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A plea in support of Mr Obama's perfectible health-care bill

I'm in no doubt that America needs universal health care for the same reasons that Europe needed it in 1945.

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Does French tech have any future at all?

France, historically a cradle of cutting-edge technology, has gradually departed from that stance and has increasingly turned into a sort of cultural but irrelevant Disneyland

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Whither France’s institutions? The tragic and unlamented end of a thirty-year golden age

From 1962 to 1992, the system put in place by de Gaulle was highly successful. This has now given way to a period of instability, governmental weakness and disillusionment

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Of the virtues of representative democracy

In this short post I argue in favour of a system that strikes a balance between the danger of bad governance posed by populism and the obvious drawbacks of dictatorship.

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Will Mr Obama bring the United States any closer to abolishing the death penalty?

Standards of decency, which have already shifted sufficiently to provoke debate on the constitutionality of lethal injection and put an end to the execution of minors, are now evolving towards complete abolition.

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The man who dreamt of a modern, rich, democratic, peaceful Iran

On January 18, 1979, thirty years ago today, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, the man who dreamt of, and then started building, a non-nuclear, peaceful, modern Iran, was forced into exile by his former Western allies, allowing the country to descend into chaos.

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I guess a moratorium, if we get one, is better than nothing

There is growing realisation that, in execution by lethal injection, a condemned prisoner’s suffering is real in many cases, but concealed by the protocol used. The Supreme Court, unfortunately, has yet to acknowledge this.

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Capote and the death penalty: turning the clock back to 1967

A review of the film about Truman, Capote, in which one deliberately veers somewhat off-topic, focusing more on the curious way in which he approached the death penalty on the occasion of his trip to Kansas.

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Don't let the French president get elected by chance

A quick look at the result of the French 2002 presidential election: the two-ballot winner-takes-all system could potentially again result in one of the two mainstream candidates not making it to the second ballot. Yet nobody seems to care.

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Abomination in Iran

My first real blog post was about an abomination. I have not been able to get the devastating news about the mollah regime in power in Iran's hanging of two innocent teenagers, for the sole reason that they were in a relationship

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Tech

Subjects I’m passionate about include code, good web design, Net neutrality, and avoiding government interference in the Internet. I write a lot about  Apple-related stuff, blogging techniques and trends in social networks.

Connecting WordPress, Lightroom and Apple Photos

How I integrate Apple Photos, Lightroom and WordPress by building on Lightroom's by sychronising the cloud-based Lightroom CC and the desktop-oriented Lightroom Classic CC and Meow Apps's WP/LR Sync plugin for WordPress.

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Preparing this site for the 2020s

The new design for this site is called Gramercy: I have used a framework for the design and simplified the content, with the biggest change being the merging of the Home page and the About page

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Google's Google Fi revolution

Google's Project Fi is an economical and powerful mobile phone plan for anyone who travels internationally

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How I effortlessly draft and maintain squeaky-clean CSS with SASS and Compass.app

How I effortlessly draft and maintain squeaky-clean CSS with SASS and Compass.app

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Switching from a (dv) to a (ve) server on Media Temple

After completing the switch to html5, switching from .net to .com, accompanied by a new design, I wanted to update my server configuration, which hadn’t changed for three years.

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Sparrow Mail: the most elegant, powerful and minimalist Mac email client

Sparrow Mail, a new email client launches today on the Mac App Store. Designed with incredible attention to detail, it offers an uncluttered yet fantastically powerful and flexible interface

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Reeder for Mac: a stunning implementation of minimalism, elegant design and practicality in one RSS client

Reeder for Mac is a stunning implementation of minimalism, elegant design and practicality in one RSS client, achieved despite the quirks and general unreliability of the Google Reader API

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Backing up a Mac to Amazon S3 with Arq: the easiest, safest and most accurate solution

Using Amazon S3, in combination with Arq, provides a much more reliable alternative to backup and restore from a Mac.

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The new MacBook Air: with its first-rate GPU and SSD, its real-life performance belies the paper specs

The new MacBook Air's superior GPU and SSD drive give it snappier performance than other machines in the range with better stats

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iTunes and Steve Jobs’s walled garden: a major strategic blunder for Apple

iTunes and Steve Jobs’s walled garden: a major strategic blunder for Apple: If Apple persists in its strategy of pretending the cloud doesn’t exist, it could end on the path as Microsoft when it turned its back on the Internet in the 1990s

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What’s ‘open’ anyway? Walled gardens will never stifle innovation and shouldn’t be confused with Net neutrality

Walled gardens will never stifle innovation and shouldn’t be confused with Net neutrality: few IT companies have shown growth without resorting to economic models perceived as ‘closed’

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Did you even know Facebook has unilaterally decided to share all your data with anyone it pleases?

A change in policy announced last week allows Facebook to share all your date with anyone they pleases, though it's still possible to opt out of this

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Improve your WordPress blog with MarsEdit, Amazon Cloudfront and Markdown

How I use MarsEdit for editing posts on my desktop, in combination with WriteRoom and TextMate. I explain how I've started using Amazon Cloudfront to store my images

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Reorganising this blog

The time has come to consolidate all the posts I’ve written since 2005 in a variety of guises, in one language and one site.

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Social networking: going towards an oligopolistic closed-shop system?

Social networking has matured. Three years ago, a vast number of start-ups were competing in the field, and few people other than geeks actually bothered to use them. Today the sector is much more concentrated

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Blogging sequentially using Writeroom, TextMate and ecto or MarsEdit

In this post we will be looking at ways to get TextMate, MarsEdit or ecto and WriteRoom to work seamlessly together so that you can concentrate on each stage of producing a blog post without being distracted and automate most of the coding and uploading processes.

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Culture

My interests span contemporary art, which has surrounded me ever since my infancy, heraldry, music, especially from Mozart up to the mid-Romantic period, as well as well-sung English choral music from the sixteenth, seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. I have worked in the field of culture and media in various capacities.

Yvonne, princesse de Bourgogne: Gerard Mortier shuts his bolt pretty triumphantly

Over the past four years, Gerard Mortier has presided over a quiet revolution in style, matched by a major shift in the audience of that venerable Parisian institution

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An amazing mixture of Roland Petit, the Corps de Ballet and Proust

A review of RolandPetit's impressive ballet Proust ou les intermittences du coeur_ : « Les enfers de Monsieur de Charlus ».

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I have been know to enjoy Rosenkavalier sometimes

A review of Gerard Mortier's lovely production of Strauss's Rosenkavalier at the Paris Bastille Opera.

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Idomeneo: a lyrical turning point

A short review of Mozart's Idomeneo, truly a revolutionary musical piece at the time it was composed, directed by Luc Bondy at the Palais Garnier in Paris.

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Benjamin Millepied takes Paris by storm

A review of Benjamin Millepied's ballet *Amoveo*, which was attended by a huge concourse of people from Paris and New York.

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The French themselves don't realise how beautifully French Les Troyens is

A quick review of *Les Troyens*, arguably France's most beautiful opera, and rather inexplicably quite misunderstood. Gerard Mortier, director of the Paris Opera, has rightly gone against this trend by making it the highlight of the year's season.

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Chopin: such appropriate music for a ballet

A review of *La Dame aux camellias* directed by Neumaier, Americas most European choreographer.

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La Dame aux Camélias: crusty old fogeys, jumping for joy

A review of Neumeier's *La Dame aux camellias*. I wonder why it took so long for this wonderful ballet piece, created in 1978, to be included in the Opera’s *répertoire*.

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Capote and the death penalty: turning the clock back to 1967

A review of the film about Truman, Capote, in which one deliberately veers somewhat off-topic, focusing more on the curious way in which he approached the death penalty on the occasion of his trip to Kansas.

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Would the Social Register types in New York hate Haneke too?

A review of Heneke's *Don Giovanni* at the Palais Garnier, which received an absolutely awful welcome from the pretentious Parisian public.

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Literature

My favourite authors are those who wrote after the turn of the nineteenth century, but before the death of Camus, which still leaves quite a wide range. This happens to coincide with the so-called période grammaticale, a period during which form was deemed to matter more than substance, not because substance did not matter, but because form was the surest way of gauging the true value of the substance behind it—a view with which I heartily agree.

Why does literature seek to give meaning to the yearning for death?

French letters since the eighteenth century are strongly coloured by death and, more particularly, by death wishes. In this post I look at a subject that most will regard as unnecessarily stern in an age where happiness has been erected into a moral imperative.

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Is Nancy Mitford no longer understood?

It is pretty standard, nowadays, to denigrate Nancy Mitford as frivolous and out of touch, but I’ve always had a sneaking liking for someone who was easily the loveliest of the Mitford sisters

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Jonathan Littell is no match for Julien Green

A review of American-born Jonathan Littel's rather heavy-handed novel, *Les Bienveillantes*. One inevitably comes to the conclusion that he is not is the same league as the other, more famous American writer who wrote in French, Julien Green.

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Capote and the death penalty: turning the clock back to 1967

A review of the film about Truman, Capote, in which one deliberately veers somewhat off-topic, focusing more on the curious way in which he approached the death penalty on the occasion of his trip to Kansas.

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Religion

Like the first Queen Elizabeth, I firmly believe in not putting windows into men’s souls (oral tradition, the words very possibly originating in a letter drafted by Bacon; in J. B. Black Reign of Elizabeth 1558–1603 [1936]). Yet like the second Queen of the same name, I take my religion (relatively) seriously and have occasionally shared thoughts about the subject here.

Benedict XVI: a traditionalist, yet more in tune with the realities of this age than his predecessor

The Pope's recent comments on the justification of using contraception are nothing more than the reaffirmation of traditional Christian doctrine

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Does being for the Liberty of England still mean being for the Protestant religion?

The Settlement Act enacted in 1701 is likely to be consigned to the dustbin of History at some point between now and the next Proclamation

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The four traditionalist bishops: were they ever validly excommunicated?

There are sound theological reasons to believe that the four traditionalist SSPX bishops were never validly excommunicated in the first place

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Feminists and homophobes have destroyed a unique four-hundred-and fifty-year-old English compromise

Virulent feminism and assertive homophobic prejudice have destroyed a quintessentially English compromise: Anglicanism. Yet the issues that have caused the most rancour are actually trivial and non-doctrinal.

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Oh, so the Pope abolished Limbo, did he?

Although belief in Limbo is common, the Roman Catholic church has never formally proclaimed its existence as a dogma in which its membership must believe

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And the Word was made flesh. Got that?

Quite simply put, the most important words ever written: a recollection for Christmas.

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Sundry

These articles don’t fit neatly into this site’s topics. Their presence here probably bears witness the incorrigible eclecticism of my range of interests.

Sixty years a Queen, with unflinching grace and steadfast devotion to duty

HM The Queen's Diamond Jubilee offers us an opportunity to reflect on a life devoted entirely to the service of her peoples both in the United Kingdom and in the Commonwealth.

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The welcome trend away from anonymous posting on the Internet

Content quality, on balance is improved immeasurably if people are prepared to stand up for they are saying. Does this mean people will comment less? Probably. Does it matter all that much? I don’t think so.

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Should France change her national anthem?

A modest, and rather frivolous, contribution to the debate that sometimes recurs about the words of France's national anthem.

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When in France, don't ever wear brown shoes after 6 pm

Never, ever, ever wear brown shoes in Paris after 6 p.m.

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Cheap Monday or how to be thin, poor and fashionable

If you want to be fashionable, you can never be too thin (that bit hasn’t changed), or too poor.

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Personal

This includes a wide range of miscellaneous topics—inevitably inducing an impression of boundless eclecticism.

Introducing Policymakr

A quick introduction to Policymakr, the new start-up I've been planning since the dramatic events of 2016

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Stuff I couldn't do without in 2011

My regular annual list of material possessions with which I cannot dispense.

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A better new decade?

I wish all who read this a very Happy New Year: I am certain I am not the only one hoping that this new decade will mark a new beginning.

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Stuff I couldn't live without in 2010

I’ve succumbed to the trend. Here’s the list of stuff I couldn’t possibly do without.

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Turn-of-the-decade tribulations

My difficult start to a new decade, and the tribulations of the French healthcare system, which is still probably the world's best

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A time to gather stones together

A short post written at a challenging time. Yet one of the many the beautiful things about hardship, when it strikes, is that spiritual comfort is always there when one needs it.

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Why I have finally decided to blog in my own name

The time has come to draw the process to a logical conclusion and make donaldjenkins.com my only home on the web.

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Why I've decided to keep a blog

In this initial post, one explains why one has succumbed the trend for keeping a blog

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