“Ira Glass said in a recent interview: ‘It’s hard to make  something that’s interesting. It’s really, really hard. … Basically, anything  that anyone makes. … It’s like a law of nature, a law of aerodynamics, that  anything that’s written or anything that’s created wants to be mediocre. The  natural state of all writing is mediocrity. It’s all tending toward mediocrity  in the same way that all atoms are sort of dissipating out toward the expanse  of the universe. … So what it takes to make anything more than mediocre is …  an act of will. ‘ “