Lance Armstrong’s confession and the Te’o girlfriend hoax are just the latest in a long line of public revelations reminding us that some things are not all they’re cracked up to be – and in fact may be the polar opposite of what we thought they were. Long-running symbols of success, such as Armstrong or the Penn State football dynasty, are exposed as charlatans or as such masters of the cover-up it would make Nixon blush. John Edwards, Arnold Schwarzenegger … who can count the number of politicians touting family values who have betrayed their own families?

We had all been reading, the French couple and I, on the three-hour flight back to Boston from Fort Lauderdale. She sat in the window seat with a newspaper, he read from a Kindle, and I fidgeted in the aisle seat, slogging through a slim but dense volume on ancient history. (The problem with being a writer is that you don’t read books; you read sentences, and it slows things down considerably.)

As we began our descent, the flight attendant came by and asked the gentleman to turn off his Kindle. When he didn’t hear her, she leaned over and gently but firmly told him to power down.