Michael Specter on Lance Armstrong, an American myth: “Everyone may lie, but here is what everyone doesn’t do…” http://nyr.kr/VZ4MfE

Photograph by George Burns/Oprah Winfrey Network/Getty.

For China, 2012 was a humbling year. When the history of China’s reform era is written, this moment may prove to be a pivot point, a time when the myths that China and the world had adopted about the politics and economics of the People’s Republic began to wash away, leaving blunt facts about what China’s idiosyncratic national system has and has not achieved. Here are some of the myths that collapsed this year: http://nyr.kr/Ty0Oqv

Illustration: A. J. Frackattack; Photograph: AFP/Getty.