Anecdotists were intellectually dishonest, and anyone who made the mistake of telling the same story more than once—about someone being arrested for public inebriation at Hamburg’s central station and who subsequently, to their great surprise, woke up sharing a cell with a former classmate; about the grandmother who was more or less on her deathbed when she gave birth to the storyteller’s mother; or about the person who had jumped the fence to Visby’s botanical garden after it had closed for the night only to discover that the garden’s Cannabis sativa had no mind-altering properties
...more
