When did you last encounter a myth? Maybe watching a movie, touring a museum or browsing the sci-fi section of your local bookstore? To contemporary men and women, myths seem mere relics of a premodern era--legendary stories of capricious gods, heroic deeds and lost cities. The physical and social anxieties that gave rise to myths have been dealt with more productively in our century by science, government and art. Right? "Not at all," says Philip Sampson. In6 Modern Myths he shows that all societies, even sophisticated and skeptical societies like ours, nurture myths that distort...