Soap operas…

Until I went to Colombia to live for a while (a majority of my life in academia, in fact), I thought soap operas were an American institution (they’re called telenovelas there and elsewhere in Latin America). I’m not a fan. I can’t imagine being a writer for one either. That would be my vision of hell. Most of them are a never-ending story, and their plots are stereotypical, trite, and plodding.

Truth be told, I haven’s watched many of them. In Colombia, they even occurred in the evenings, maybe...