241. Sebastian Junger on Escaping Death and the Perils of Misunderstanding Young Men

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“The Left has done itself a huge disservice by demonizing men,” says Sebastian Junger, while discussing his recent piece, “Young Men and How the Democrats Lost Them.”

The post ran on his new Substack, named TRIBE, also the title of his 2016 book, though readers may know him best from his 1997 blockbuster, The Perfect Storm, about the sinking of the commercial fishing vessel Andrea Gail.

More recently, Junger is the author of In My Time of Dying, a chronicle of a medical emergency that brought him within seconds of death.

“And then my dead father appears above me to welcome me to help me cross over,” says Junger. Did it make sense that Junger, an atheist, would be visited at that moment by his father, who was “a physicist and an atheist, which is like atheist squared”? Or is that the wrong question? Had he come, as physicist Sir Author Eddington did 100 years ago, up against the essential nature of existence and concluded, “Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.”

Nancy and Junger talk politics, publishing, the liberal publication that asked him to write a piece about what it means to be a man in today’s society and then spiked it because, as the editor wrote, “The science seems solid but the conclusions go against the prevailing political currents at this publication,” and the public capacity for collective resistance, viz. Minneapolis.

“At the end of the day, our politics have to be calm and reasonable,” Junger says. “If they’re inflamed and angry, it leads to chaos and conflict.”

Also discussed:

* Sebastian Junger, flip-phone devotee

* Substack is the new busking

* On 95% of workplace and combat fatalities being male: “You can kill enormous numbers of men with almost no impact on the population. You kill the same number of women and the population crashes.”

* “Megyn Kelly’s, in my opinion, almost sociopathic remarks…”

* The deeply empathetic filmmaker Meg Smaker and the shame of the people who don’t want her work seen

* Some love for National Review

* Hemingway’s penchant for five-syllable titles

* The sinking this week of another fishing boat off Gloucester

Plus, Junger on Restrepo, the documentary he made with his late friend Tim Hetherington (“A human and experiential look at what it feels like to be a soldier in combat”); on WWI/WWII reporter Mary Heaton Vorse (“One of the most extraordinary voices in American literature”), the sexiness of a book that fits in the back pocket of your jeans, and much more!

NOTE: Sarah’s schedule kept her from being on this podcast, but she will be back soon.

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