Media Notes: Bluesky, bigots, bonds

As I started building up a Bluesky social media account last week, some of the people I followed on X could not yet be found there. After this weekend, most of them have joined. The way Bluesky is growing, there's practically no one for whose posts I have to go to X any more

Some combination of revulsion against Elon Musk's manipulations of X and the sense that Bluesky might be a less toxic alternative, with more of the attractions Twitter used to have, had helped send a flood of enrollments there:  a million new ones a day right now, apparently. (It's actually making news.) 

Happy to say, most of the historians I used to follow on X have now moved over. I can probably just delete X altogether pretty soon. 

The rise of Bluesky is new enough still that when new-Blue Ian Mosby posted a note about a  journal article of his and offered to send a copy to anyone who direct-messaged him, there was a flood of replies beneath, along the lines of:  "Help, I'd like to get the article but haven't figured out how to DM in Bluesky yet!" 

In other media, i.e. the Globe and Mail, I admired Bill Waiser's recent article about a curator in Saskatchewan who discovered a cache of KKK robes in the collection of his museum.  I particularly liked how he made the curator, a longtime public history guy, into a central part of the story. Many journalists would have neglected that angle, in favour of some cliche about dusty archives. Archives are rarely dusty!

And in truly ancient media (i.e, books): props to my friend Ian Kyer for his 2023 book The Ontario Bond Scandal Re-examined. It's a good story. See, there was a bond scandal in Ontario in the 1920s, and a politician and a rich bondtrader were actually sent to jail -- which is always satisfying and has been noted in a number of histories. 

But Kyer, who was a PhD in medieval history before he became a corporate lawyer -- there are a few people like that around -- knows more about the working of bond markets than most of the historians who have written about the case. He makes a pretty good argument that there was reasonable doubt, at the very least, of the guilt of the accused, and that the convictions stemmed mostly from the incompetence and mendacity of a good few of the province's judges.  And that some of his mentors in legal history followed the judges more than the evidence. 

Of course, part of what I liked about the book is how he cites me on the legal and ethical shortcomings of the Ontario judiciary of the early twentieth century (and one or two other matters too).