For two decades, I’ve lived between New York City and Oxfordshire, and when in the autumn of 2008 I came back to New York, I got a television for the first time in years. I said I wanted it in order to follow the presidential election, but it was really so I could view entire episodes of As The World Turns, not just online excerpts. As The World Turns, one of the oldest soap operas on network television, became the only program I watched; for election coverage, I went back to my laptop. On As The World Turns, impetuous…