Here’s a place to ask a simple question: How do we know a story is good? I once heard the writer and comic artist Lynda Barry cite a neurological study that said that when we get to the end of a story, a short lyric poem, or a joke, the brain performs an instantaneous retro-assessment for efficiency. If, as I tell the one about the duck who walks into a bar, I interject a fifteen-minute digression about the duck’s childhood that turns out to have nothing to do with the punch line, your brain notes this as an inefficiency and, at the end, you laugh less. On what basis does the mind assess for
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