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In 1987, a few years after Margaret Mead and Samoa was published, it was discovered that one of Mead’s close informers in 1926, Fa’apua’a Fa’amu, was still alive, and wished to swear on the Bible to clear the record on what she had told Mead all those years ago about sexual relations among the Samoans: We said that we were out all night with the boys; she failed to realize that we were just joking and must have been taken in by our pretenses…She must have taken it seriously but I was only joking. As you know, Samoan girls are...

Early 20th century photo depicts Samoan girls preparing for the 'ava ceremony.' Wikimedia Commons If Alfred Kinsey of the Kinsey Reports was the “Father of the Sexual Revolution,” perhaps no one woman can be more accurately called the “Mother of the Sexual Revolution” than Margaret Mead. Margaret Mead was a young anthropologist who set out to help anthropology professor Frank Boas of Columbia University prove a very specific thesis: that a person’s upbringing and environment shaped a person’s actions to a greater extent than genetic factors did. Together with another young scholar named Ruth Benedict, Mead set off to...

One evening, after watching Homer Simpson wreck the family car at a monster-truck rally and plunge on a skateboard into Springfield Gorge, my 6-year-old son asked me, "Why are dads on TV so dumb?" Having grown up with the omniscient fathers on "Leave It to Beaver" and "My Three Sons," I wanted to give a bemused yet authoritative answer, chuckling wisely as I explained the ways of the world. But this question left me feeling more like Homer Simpson. Where did we fathers go wrong? We spend twice as much time with our kids as we did two decades ago,...