A year ago today in Jonathan Mayhew's blog:

National Middle-brow Radio officially fell to National Low-Brow Radio today with Terry Gross's interview of minor celebrity ex-spouse Tom Arnold. He had nothing interesting to say about his dysfunctional life. Rose briefly to highbrow with a discussion with Wendy Steiner and Arthur Danto on beauty in art--flawed because noone seemed to be asking the questions that I would have asked. The panelists seemed to assume that modernist art and literature were ugly by definition and that we needed to return to beauty. Back to National Middle-Brow Radio with an interview with Jonathan Franzen, a rather dull and earnest novelist, most famous for snubbing Oprah (a middle-brow gesture if ever there was one) plugging his book of essays. That's what I get for having to spend five hours in my car.

I have two major objections to what I wrote: the objection that Steiner and Danto didn't address my particular concerns is absurd: how could they read my mind? My characterization of Franzen as a dull novelist is unfair, because I've never read his novels. He may or may not be a dull novelist. What I meant to say is that he's a dull person to interview.