The Slatest

CNN's Erin Burnett interviewed Sebastian Junger late Monday night, no doubt hoping that the author of The Perfect Storm would deliver a pull-quote that would put this whole thing in perspective, ideally one that mentioned his best-selling book that turned into a Hollywood hit. (I know I was personally hoping for something along the lines of: This is a more perfect perfect storm.)

Alas, he didn't quite deliver. Here's what he said:

"Well, the storms are similar in some ways. In the storm I wrote about—and in this storm, obviously—there was a major hurricane, there was a low-pressure system and there was a high-pressure system. And those things combined in really catastrophic ways. The meteorologists that I interview for my book sort of groped for a way to explain it to me and said, 'Look it was a perfect storm.' All the variables that make a storm bad, they were all maxed out. And in some ways that's happened again with this storm. Of course, the big difference is that today it's a hurricane that's coming ashore. In the storm I wrote about the hurricane stayed at sea and the nor'easter, low-pressure system, hit the coast with devastating affect."