Alessandro
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poli.sisti.ca
Alessandro
@poli.sisti.ca
610 followers 600 following 600 posts
Posts on public policy (in 🇨🇦 or abroad), humanities, classical music, altruism effective and ineffective. Many silly posts. Toronto-adjacent.
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poli.sisti.ca
"'Reed' with two E's? It's my favorite joke of all time."
Captain Holt displays a copy of Reed it and Weep Mouth Exercises, by oboist John William Weichselbraun.
November 8, 2025 at 5:04 AM
poli.sisti.ca
From the Wikipedia article "Top hat", one of my childhood's burning questions answered at last:
The style most commonly referred to as the stovepipe was popularized in the United States by Abraham Lincoln during his presidency; though it is postulated that he may never have called it stovepipe himself, but merely a silk hat or a plug hat. Lincoln often carried documents and letters inside the hat.
November 7, 2025 at 12:55 PM
poli.sisti.ca
I believe this is one of the articles Hemingway would have written. It's from when James Macleod, returning from travel, had just heard the news of the prize and Banting's decision to share his portion with Best.

More context for the clip: collections.library.utoronto.ca/view/insulin...
Newspaper article entitled "Asks Time to Consider Prize Award Disposal".
October 18, 2025 at 5:39 PM
poli.sisti.ca
James D. Havens (1900-1960) was the son of James S. Havens, who attended Yale as an undergraduate and later studied law. James Sr. briefly served as a congressman.

The doctor, John R. Williams, who was treating Jim's diabetes visited Toronto to make a personal appeal to Banting for insulin in 1921.
James D. Havens, c. 1921, sitting in a hospital bed.
October 16, 2025 at 1:47 PM
poli.sisti.ca
Elizabeth (1907-1981) was the daughter of Charles Evans Hughes, the 36th governor of New York State, the 1916 Republican opponent to Woodrow Wilson, and secretary of state under Warren Harding.

Elizabeth's mother, Antoinette, heard about Banting and persuaded him to accept Elizabeth as a patient.
Elizabeth Hughes c. 1923, looking healthy. The photograph is signed "Gratefully yours, Elizabeth E. Hughes." Clipping from the Toronto Daily Star, August 17th, 1922, "Daughter of Secretary of State Tries New Toronto Discovery." A triptych of portraits is shown. A caption explains the portaits as follows: "On the left is Mrs. Charles Evans Hughes, who accompanied her daughter to Toronto this week to take a new treatment for diabetes, which has been worked out at the University of Toronto. In the centre is her fifteen-year-old daughter, who is here to take the treatment. On the right is Dr. F.G. Banting, 160 Bloor street west, who is the originator of the insulin treatment for diabetes, and who for over a year has been doing research work along with Mr. C.H. Best, of Toronto. The new treatment has already prolonged the lives of many sufferers from the disease."
October 16, 2025 at 1:47 PM
poli.sisti.ca
Thread of things I'm learning as I read The Discovery of Insulin by Michael Bliss
Book cover, in the Special Centenary Edition with a forward by Alison Li.
October 5, 2025 at 6:34 PM
poli.sisti.ca
I see my alma mater has gotten into podcasts
Email from the University of Toronto welcoming Alessandro to U of T Lectures on Demand.
October 1, 2025 at 10:07 PM
poli.sisti.ca
All three episodes of this documentary on the malaria vaccine are now available ☺️
September 29, 2025 at 12:53 PM
poli.sisti.ca
A little-known invention that made obsolete a lot of child labour: the "scandiscope", invented by George Smart (1757ish – 1834), allowed an adult chimney sweep to avoid employing "climbing boys" as assistants.

Words by @antonhowes.bsky.social:
In 1803 the Society for Superseding the Necessity of Climbing Boys (SSNCB) was founded to promote a technological replacement for child labour in sweeping chimneys. To meet the challenge, by 1805 Smart applied his interlocking hollow poles to design a ‘scandiscope’. A sweep could sit in safety at the hearth, assembling the poles while pushing them up the chimney shaft. Once the contraption reached the top, a cord running down the middle of the tubes was pulled, opening brushes to pull the soot back down with it. A skilled sweep could use it to clean a chimney in as little as 9 minutes, and, with a wet rag over the brush, it could put out house fires starting in the flue. In recognition of his achievement, the Society of Arts awarded Smart its gold medal in 1805 and 1807, and he received a premium from the SSNCB in 1805. By keeping his prices low, and with the SSNCB's backing, Smart's scandiscope spread rapidly throughout London. By 1807 the prince of Wales had adopted the technology for use at his residences. It met more resistance in other cities, but finally armed with a viable alternative to climbing boys (with later improvements to the device in 1828 by Joseph Glass), the SSNCB turned its attention to lobbying for legislation to force the scandiscope's adoption, with eventual success.
September 20, 2025 at 2:15 PM
poli.sisti.ca
In Newfoundland, a recently released report on "Transforming and Modernizing" education had a number of fabricated references.

Managers who are encouraging the thoughtless use of AI in their organizations need to stop. They are undermining trust in anything their colleagues produce.
Screenshot of CBC News article: "Errors happen. Made-up citations are a totally different thing where you essentially demolish the trustworthiness of the material," said Josh Lepawsky, the former president of the Memorial University Faculty Association who resigned from the report's advisory board last January, citing a "deeply flawed process" leading to "top-down" recommendations. The 418-page Education Accord NL report took 18 months to complete and was unveiled Aug. 28 by its co-chairs Anne Burke and Karen Goodnough, both professors at Memorial's Faculty of Education. The pair released the report alongside Education Minister Bernard Davis. "We are investigating and checking references, so I cannot respond to this at the moment," wrote Goodnough in an email declining an interview Thursday. Davis also declined an interview request.
September 12, 2025 at 5:28 PM
poli.sisti.ca
Well, I know I don't have prosopagnosia
Three cracked eggs in a bowl have yolks arranged in a way vaguely resembling to face.
September 11, 2025 at 6:34 PM
poli.sisti.ca
My schoolteachers never told me that there was politics in everything. This feels like the time I found out about Harry Houdini's lobbying against fortune-telling!

blogs.loc.gov/headlinesand...
Screenshot of text: Never before had a congressional hearing been described as “UPROARIOUS,” until master magician and escape artist Harry Houdini provided expert testimony in which he delivered a lively and compelling case against the supernatural. For years, Houdini had worked tirelessly to debunk spirit mediums who claimed to communicate with the dead. He viewed them as “ghost racketeers,” charlatans conning grieving and vulnerable people out of money. The “mysterious entertainer” and his network of undercover investigators visited mediums and attended seances in disguise to expose the parlor tricks and deception they witnessed. During the early 1920s, Houdini lectured about spiritualism across the U.S., recreating the tricks that mediums used to dupe the public. He claimed to have collected one of the largest libraries in the world on psychic phenomena and even published his own book on the subject, A Magician Among the Spirits (1924). It was this extensive background that led Houdini to testify in February and May of 1926 as a central witness at congressional hearings for a bill to regulate fortune telling in Washington before the Subcommittee on the Judiciary of the Committee on the District of Columbia. As a dedicated psychic investigator intent on exposing all mediums as frauds, Houdini testified before his toughest audience yet as the room was packed with local fortune tellers, astrologers, mediums, and spiritualists. Ever the consummate performer, Houdini testified with skill and dramatic flair. He demonstrated the slate trick and produced a message from Benjamin Franklin from beyond the grave. He presented a “sucker list” of those who lost their fortunes to mediums, and called devoted spiritualist and famed creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “one of the greatest dupes.”
September 11, 2025 at 12:39 PM
poli.sisti.ca
Ford is doing the drunk driving Dril tweet, but for speeding
September 9, 2025 at 3:23 PM
poli.sisti.ca
Ezra Klein (bold text) has a vision of where American politics is headed, as legal scholar Kate Shaw (normal text) discusses Trump running for a third term
September 8, 2025 at 1:21 PM
poli.sisti.ca
always a delight to think of a pun-based business idea and then find it's real
Instagram page for "Stationery in Motion", an online store for handmade stationery.
September 8, 2025 at 12:08 AM
poli.sisti.ca
The discoverer of GLP-1 agonists in Novo Nordisk, Lotte Bjerre Knudsen, has benefitted financially from her discovery almost not at all. And she's quite all right with that.

From Der Spiegel: www.spiegel.de/internationa...
September 7, 2025 at 10:16 PM
poli.sisti.ca
and it shall be called Mark Zuccherberg
Alessandro holding a moderately large zucchino.
September 6, 2025 at 11:21 PM
poli.sisti.ca
This exchange also not bad
September 4, 2025 at 3:35 AM
poli.sisti.ca
missed this amazing story from last year in Vietnam
Screenshot of text. Vietnam colon outrage at student height requirement. Too short to study? Students can revise hard for the top grades, but there's little they can do about meeting a minimum height requirement for this one University program. Article from 2024 by Rodion Ebbinghausen. The School of Management and business at the Vietnam National University in Hanoi believes the connection between height and successes so significant that people who are supposedly "too short" should no longer be allowed to study. The school announced that female students must be at least 1.58 metres tall and male students at least 1.65 metres tall to be considered for admission this year. It added that exceptions could be allowed in some cases.
September 3, 2025 at 9:14 PM
poli.sisti.ca
Crazy Rich Asians
September 2, 2025 at 4:57 PM
poli.sisti.ca
the recent past was a strange place.

From the New York Times archives (spelling mistakes are digital transcription errors):
Screen capture of headline: Business technology: No more 'Anything Goes': Cyberspace Gets Censors. Article by Peter H. Lewis, June 29th, 1994. Freedom of expression has always been the rule in the fast-growing global web of public and private computer networks known as cyberspace. But even as thousands of Americans each week join the several million who use computer networks to share ideas and "chat" with others, the companies that control the networks, and sometimes individual users, are beginning to play the role of censor. Earlier this month, the America Online network shut several feminist discussion forums, saying it was concerned that the subject matter might be inappropriate for young girls who would see the word "girl" in the forum's headline and "go in there looking for information about their Barbies," a spokeswoman said.
September 2, 2025 at 1:30 PM
poli.sisti.ca
🫡
Screenshot from Substack: Sisti has subscribed.
September 2, 2025 at 3:23 AM
poli.sisti.ca
This book comes out tomorrow. Really looking forward to it. Realizing how much nonhuman animals are capable of is one of the biggest ways my thinking has shifted the past few years
Cover of the book "The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters", by Christine Webb. Screenshot of the book description in three parts. It reads thus: An impassioned celebration of humility before the living world that leads us to a new understanding of other species—and ourselves Darwin considered humans one part of the web of life, not the apex of a natural hierarchy. Yet today many maintain that we are the most intelligent, virtuous, successful species that ever lived. This flawed thinking enables us to exploit the earth towards our own exclusive ends, throwing us into a perilous planetary imbalance. But is this view and way of life inevitable? The Arrogant Ape shows that human exceptionalism is an ideology that relies more on human culture than our biology, more on delusion and faith than on evidence. Harvard primatologist Christine Webb has spent years researching the rich social, emotional, and cognitive lives of our closest living relatives. She exposes the ways that many scientific studies are biased against other species and reveals underappreciated complexities of nonhuman life—from the language of songbirds and prairie dogs, to the cultures of chimpanzees and reef fishes, to the acumen of plants and fungi. With compelling stories and fresh research she gives us a paradigm-shifting way of looking at other organisms on their own terms, one that is revolutionizing our perception both of them and of ourselves. Critiques of human exceptionalism tend to focus on our moral obligation towards other species. They overlook what humanity also stands to gain by dismantling its illusions of uniqueness and superiority. This shift in perspective fills us with a sense of awe and satisfies one of our oldest and deepest desires to belong to the larger whole we inhabit. What’s at stake is a better, sustainable way of life with the potential to heal and rejuvenate our shared planet.
September 1, 2025 at 12:40 PM
poli.sisti.ca
What exactly are you expecting him to do? I have never loved Carney (see attached tweet), but we're in a bad bargaining position, no allies have joined us, and imposing tariffs hurts only ourselves
August 22, 2025 at 6:04 PM
poli.sisti.ca
Through all the fake news, through all the algorithmic outrage, I've never been so mad at my experience on social media as when I'm forced to endure dozens of ads daily that a human couldn't even bother to write
Screenshot of Facebook comment box with the following text ready to send: Thank you, ChatGPT, for gracing us with your superhuman presence, by which you transform pixels into visual blandness and verbal prolixity. May Your Slopitude forever arrest our attention away from the work of our human brethren. In Jensen's name. Amen.
August 21, 2025 at 3:38 AM