The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters , by Juliette Kayyem, pub. PublicAffairs Flying into combat in a helicopter during the Apocalypse Now movie version of the Vietnam war, Jay “Chef” Hicks asks a fellow soldier why he and his comrades all sit on their helmets. “So we don’t get our balls blown off,” comes the droll reply. Chef lights up with laughter – then soberly takes off and sits on his helmet. “Preparation for what really matters! The core essence!” exclaims Juliette Kayyem during a video call from her home in Cambridge, in the US state of Massachusetts, at mention of the scene. The author of The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters – a study of the psychology of our approach, and reaction to, all manner of catastrophes – Los Angeles native Kayyem describes herself as “optimistically realistic”, rather than fatalistic or habitually “just saying bad things are going to happen all the time”. She also reveals, amid more laughter, “My husband once said to me, ‘You didn’t get the stew gene.’ For some reason I don’t stew. I think that’s genetic; maybe it’s California. ‘We’ve got a problem, let’s fix this! Denial is not an option!’” Falling back on such a sunny outlook makes sense considering Kayyem’s day jobs: a former Obama-administration assistant secretary for intergovernmental affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, she is a professor in international security at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, a public- and private-sector consultant in the same field, and CNN’s go-to “disaster commentator” and national security analyst. The use of infection rates as a significant metric in a world of vaccines no longer seems helpful from a planning perspective. Juliette Kayyam on Hong Kong’s Covid-19 strategy Much of her experience is poured into The Devil Never Sleeps , with its common-sense take on facing up to things most of us would rather not think about – the events she reviews including those of September 11, the Lion Air Boeing 737 crash in Indonesia, Hurricane Katrina, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion and the Fukushima nuclear meltdown. An accessible volume even described as “chatty” by one early reader, the book begins by explaining, using an easily grasped diagram, the two sides of a disaster framework: left of boom and right of boom. The “boom”, sitting between the two, is the disaster. Left: “all the things we can do to stop a disaster happening”, writes Kayyem. Right: “all the things we can do to pick up the pieces when it does”. And there’s the crux: like the attack on Chef’s helicopter, disaster is inevitable – because the devil never sleeps. What she hopes the book will promote, therefore, is a “less bad standard” of disaster planning and recovery, meaning what Kayyem calls consequence minimisation through sustained preparedness. “The way we structure crisis management is like some notion of beginning, middle, end,” she says. “I don’t know what world people are living in, but I’m 52 and I’ve never seen unicorns. “So what I want to show through this history of crisis management is that the standard of success is not whether we stop the bad thing happening – although I don’t deny that would be a good thing – but whether the consequences of something we know is bound to happen are less bad than they otherwise would have been because we recognised it was coming.” Covid-19 crisis at Hong Kong’s care homes: a disaster waiting to happen Also inevitable is appraisal of Hong Kong’s Covid-19 strategy. “Hong Kong is a perfect example of being totally left of boom,” says Kayyem. “Prevent, protect, we can stop it. But what’s your less bad standard when managing a million different interests in a society that needs to be open, to move on and wants to get out into the world? “Covid is a novel virus – it’s not a new crisis. Two things in the Hong Kong approach reflect the bind it is in,” she continues. “[First], the use of infection rates as a significant metric in a world of vaccines no longer seems helpful from a planning perspective. “The goal in flattening the curve, pre-vaccines, was to protect health care systems. That is not true any more. Hong Kong’s focus on infections is a very 2020, pre-vaccine metric, but now, infection rates [don’t represent] the right-hand side of the boom, which should be: are you getting vaccines to people so you’re minimising deaths? “Second, any disaster- or crisis-management system that doesn’t have a plan for failing safely is not prepared,” adds Kayyem. “Keeping Covid out in a world without vaccines was maybe the right strategy, but failing safely has to change over time because our tools to mitigate the risk change. “This is adaptive recovery – we’re going to learn to adapt around this virus, but there’s no reason that infections have to be our metric any more. “We have to be led to the recovery, rather than trying to hold it off, which Hong Kong is doing. You can’t talk about a world of risk elimination; and the idea of a finish line is just a bad concept.” The oxymoronic notion of failing safely – the book describes a fail-safe as a “specific design” in a device or system not intended “to prevent failure but to mitigate the consequences” – is another pillar of the author’s philosophy. And failing safely, it seems, is important today because, as Kayyem writes, “disasters are the standard now. They are not the aberration, but the norm.” Really? Even in an age of global warming, terrorism and technological calamities, are disasters occurring more frequently than ever – or are we simply hearing more about them thanks to social media and non-stop news? “All of the above,” says Kayyem. “Part of it is our knowledge of what’s going on, but also the impact: a few guys getting sick in Wuhan becomes a global pandemic because of our connectivity, which is a burden and a strength. And many billion-dollar disasters are happening now if you look at it monetarily. “Also, we tend to talk about disasters in the 1960s or whenever as if they were one-offs and it’s Whac-A-Mole: ‘We dealt with that!’ It’s not. But that’s our standard operating procedure.” “The devil will return,” writes Kayyem. But will we be ready? Because, to borrow from Hollywood again: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”