The Best American Magazine Writing 2014 Read online

  I mentioned an experience I’d had over the summer, when I took my daughter to a water park we’d been to many times and found it transformed by the availability of a “Fast Pass,” which allows visitors to pay an extra forty-five dollars to go to the head of the lines. “It changed everything,” I said, “because people were now paying to cut the line, and everybody knew that it was unfair. I knew it, my daughter knew it, and so did the people doing the cutting.”

  Damon nodded. “If you really want to know what it’s like to be famous, all you have to do is go to that water park and pay your forty-five bucks. Go to the water park and that’s what it’s like.

  “You jump the line.”

  • • •

  Here’s one last story. Matt Damon tells it, but it’s not about Matt Damon. It’s about George Clooney. But it’s not really about George Clooney, either, because Damon wouldn’t be telling it if it weren’t also about Russell Crowe. Damon loves telling Russell Crowe stories, in Russell Crowe’s voice. But the story’s all about the questions of selling out and hypocrisy, so maybe it’s about Damon after all. He’s been wrestling with these things because he recently began lending his ridiculously believable speaking voice to commercials. It frankly seems an unnecessary inner struggle, given that everybody in his business, from Jeff Bridges to Jon Hamm to Denis Leary, is allowing himself to be used as voice talent.

  “I know,” he says, “but it’s still a commercial. What’s the line that Paul Newman used to say—‘shameless exploitation in pursuit of common good’? I tell myself that. I mean, I give all the money to [Damon’s foundation] Water.org. I couldn’t imagine keeping it. But let’s face it—the money I contribute from the commercial is money I don’t have to contribute from my pocket. One way or another, I’m getting paid. So maybe I’m a big hypocrite.”

  Of course, Clooney does a lot of voice work, too, especially in Europe. And one day, Damon says, “Russell called him out for doing a commercial in Italy. He called him a sellout—George, who never got full boat. George, who’s always cutting his deal to work with the directors he wants to work with. So George said, ‘Wait a minute. The only way I could live is if I do this fucking espresso commercial. What the fuck? Why are you attacking me? You’re calling me a sellout? Look at your fucking movies, man!’

  “And George is the best prankster. But he doesn’t do anything. He’s furious—but he sits on it. And then Russell wins a [British Academy of Film and Television Arts] award, and he goes up in front of the BAFTAs and reads a poem he wrote. He goes on for so long that when they show it that night, they edit it. They’re at a party and they’re all in tuxedos and they’re playing the thing back, and Russell sees that his speech is truncated. And he famously grabs the producer of the show and throws him against the wall, and it has to be broken up.

  “So the next year, George gets nominated. He’s got Good Night, and Good Luck and he’s got Michael Clayton, and he’s up for, like, fifty fucking BAFTAs. And he wins one of them. So he gets onstage. But a few weeks before, he was in a bookstore and saw a book by Russell Crowe. It’s called My Heart, My Song, and it’s a book of Russell’s poetry.

  “So George gets up in front of the BAFTA audience, and they’re cheering him on, and he goes, ‘I hear you like poetry’ And instantly the place goes dead quiet. Then he just reaches into his tux and pulls out the book, and he goes, ‘My Heart, My Song, by Russell Crowe.’ And the place instantly goes wild. He picks a poem to read, and every line people are falling out of their chairs and he’s gotta hold twenty seconds for their laughter.

  “And he reads the whole thing and he says, ‘Thank you. Good night, good luck.’

  “And he walks off.”

  It’s a delicious story, too good to be true. Russell Crowe did, in fact, read a poem at the BAFTA awards in 2002, but not one of his own. He made a CD called My Hand, My Heart, but he has never published a book of poems. George Clooney never won a BAFTA until this year, when he won as a producer of Affleck’s Argo. Does any of this make the story any less delicious? It does not, because the story’s flavor does not derive from its veracity. It derives from proximity—from the fact that you are listening to Matt Damon tell it on the patio instead of watching him tell it from the other side of the lake.

  • • •

  The sun’s going down when his BlackBerry pings. He pulls it out of his pocket, and when he looks at it he almost seems to flinch, but it’s the quick jolt of his smile snapping his head back an inch. He’s at a table full of people, but he does not take his eyes off the screen. His face fills with light, and what can be heard, in the sudden silence, is the voice of a little girl reporting the news from home: the fact that one of Damon’s other daughters has lost a tooth. Then we hear what he hears—“I love you, Daddy!”—and his smile deepens as his shoulders sag, and we see that look of pride and pain common to every father in the world who has to experience the love of a child from a helpless distance. He can’t answer because what he’s just seen is a video that his children made and his wife attached to an e-mail. So he doesn’t say anything, just slides the BlackBerry back in his pocket, and for the first time since I’ve met him, Matt Damon is, for the moment, alone.

  There are a few more stories and a few more beers, but the dusk deepens to darkness, and he stands up to go back to his room. George Clooney is long gone, but along and across the lake they are still clustered, and now they wave to him. They have been waiting for him to go before they disperse, and he waves back. They are all Germans, 5 percent different from him, but he is 5 percent different not just from them but also from everyone else. When he turns his back on them one last time, they call “Goodnight” to him, in English.

  Fast Company

  WINNER—MAGAZINE OF THE YEAR

  When the National Magazine Awards judges chose the Magazine of the Year for 2014, one of the reasons Fast Company won was the editors’ coverage of industrial design—on their network of websites, especially Co.Design, and in print iterations such as the tenth annual Innovation by Design Issue. The cover story of that issue was this oral history of Apple design. There may, of course, be some readers who think an oral history is not, well, writing, but nowhere is the skill of the interviewer and editor more evident than in a piece like “Apple Breaks the Mold”—a story about what is for many Americans not a business but a way of life, told only in the words of the people who created it.

  Max Chafkin

  Apple Breaks the Mold

  An Oral History

  “This is our signature,” Apple’s gauzy television ads proclaim, referring to the familiar words that the company stamps on the undersides of its products: DESIGNED BY APPLE IN CALIFORNIA. The ads fall in the grand Apple tradition—beginning with the “1984” Super Bowl spot—of seeming to say a great deal while revealing little. The singular Cupertino computer company is one of the most intensely competitive, pathologically secretive organizations in the world.

  If there is one thing that CEO Tim Cook doesn’t want people to know, it’s what dwells behind his company’s “signature.” As a result, most efforts to explain design at Apple end up reducing a complex thirty-seven-year history to bromides about simplicity, quality, and perfection—as if those were ambitions unique to Apple alone.

  So Fast Company set out to remedy that deficiency. It wasn’t easy. Precious few designers have left Sir Jonathan Ive’s industrial design group since he took over in 1996: Two quit; three died. (We talked to the two who quit, among dozens of other longtime Apple veterans.) What we found is that the greatest business story of the past two decades—how Apple used design to rise from near bankruptcy to become the most valuable company in the world—is completely misunderstood.

  Outsiders have tended to assume that because longtime CEO Steve Jobs was a champion of products in which hardware and software work together seamlessly, Apple itself was a paragon of collaboration. In fact, the opposite was often true.

  What’s more, the myth of Jobs’s exile in 1985 and restoratio
n in 1997 has obscured the fact that much of the critical design work that led to Apple’s resurgence started while Jobs was running Pixar and NeXT. Ive—of whom Jobs once said, “He has more operational power than anyone else at Apple except me”—joined the company in 1992. And since Ive added software to his domain, in 2012, the industrial designer has even more power now.

  Neither Ive, nor anyone else at Apple, was willing to speak on the record for this article. As a result, this story is different from any other you’ve read about Apple. It is an oral history of Apple’s design, a decoding of the signature as told by the people who helped create it. Its roots go back to the 1980s, when Jobs’s metaphor that the computer is a “bicycle for the mind” became a touchstone for design at Apple, an expression of the ambition to turn high tech into simple and accessible devices. In the immediate aftermath of Jobs’s 1985 ouster, Apple had some commercial success, thanks in part to the work of Hartmut Esslinger’s Frog Design (now Frog). But Esslinger followed Jobs to NeXT in the late 1980s, and as the 1990s wore on, Apple struggled as a me-too PC maker, and its market share plummeted. Our creative conversation starts in those dark days, when a hardy few trying to hold onto Jobs’s ideals are heartened by the arrival of a soft-spoken, young industrial designer from the United Kingdom.

  1992: “Here Lies the Guy Who Hired Jonathan Ive”

  ROBERT BRUNNER, founder, Apple’s industrial design group (now founder of Ammunition and the designer of Beats headphones): I sometimes joke that when I die, my tombstone will say, “Here lies the guy who hired Jonathan Ive.” Jonathan had shown up at my old firm, Lunar, on a bursary scholarship. He was this quiet, polite English kid with these models. They weren’t just well-designed objects; he’d actually engineered them. I thought, Wow, this is someone I’d like to have on my team.

  When I first got to Apple in 1989, I called Jony [Ive] to see if he was interested in coming to work at Apple. He said no. He’d just started his own firm, Tangerine, and he wanted to see it through. In 1992, I hired Tangerine for this mobility project called Juggernaut. I have to admit part of the reason was because I wanted to see if I could get him interested in Apple. They built some wonderful models. When Jony came over to show them, it was a beautiful, sunny weekend in California. And when I asked again if he was interested, he said yes.

  THOMAS MEYERHOFFER, senior industrial designer, Ive’s first hire (now runs his own design firm): We wanted to put design forward as a competitive tool for Apple, but nobody really understood what design could do. There was a great urge from us in the design group to say: Apple is different, Apple has always been different.

  BRUNNER: There was a guy on our team, Thomas Meyerhoffer, who was working on the eMate. We took the guts and the operating system of the [proto tablet] Newton and put it in a clamshell. The idea was a very simplified computer for kids. That’s where the whole translucent, bulbous form of the iMac got started.

  MEYERHOFFER: Every laptop you’d seen before was square and a big chunk of beige plastic. I wanted to make this product look light and fun. And because nobody knows what’s inside those beige boxes, I wanted to give the feeling that there was something intelligent in there. I used a translucent plastic because that’s the only way you can do that. It gave the product more life.

  DOUG SATZGER, industrial design creative lead (now VP, industrial design, Intel): We worked on a lot of cool concepts. But still, under [then-CEO] Gil Amelio, design didn’t mean anything. You’d design a product and marketing would say, “Well, we only gave you fifteen dollars to do this and it’s gonna cost us twenty dollars, so we’re gonna badge a Dell computer or Canon printer.” We were a marketing-driven company that wasn’t focused on design, or even delivering a product. I saw that if this was the way it was going to continue, then I should probably leave. Jony knew that, and we had discussions about how the whole team would move if that were to happen.

  Meanwhile, things were even worse in the software division, where Apple’s operating system had been surpassed by the far-superior Windows 95.

  CORDELL RATZLAFF, manager, Mac OS human interface group (now a user experience director at Google): There was a project code-named Copland, which was supposed to be Apple’s next-generation operating system. It was probably one of the worst-managed projects ever at Apple. After a couple of years, it was clear that it was never going to ship.

  DON LINDSAY, design director, Mac OS user experience group (now VP, user experience, BlackBerry): Shortly after that, Apple acquired NeXT—and, of course, along with that package comes Steve Jobs.

  1998: “Good Enough to Lick”

  The deal to acquire NeXT for $429 million closed in December 1996. Jobs would be named interim CEO of Apple the following summer. One of his first moves: teaming up with Ive, who replaced Brunner as head of the industrial design group in 1996, to redesign the company’s desktop computers. Ive was just thirty years old at the time.

  SATZGER: For Steve’s first interview with us, we cleaned up in the studio. We knew Steve was a loud talker but that he wanted his voice to be focused on whom he was talking to. When he walked in the door, we turned up the music, so his conversations stayed between the person he was with.

  JEFF ZWERNER, creative director, packaging (now a VP at Evernote): Jony manufactured every facet of that space as if to make Steve feel comfortable—from what they wore to the ambient techno music that was playing. There was an unwritten rule that if Steve came in, everyone had to slowly and deliberately move to the other side of the space.

  JON RUBINSTEIN, senior VP, hardware engineering, Ive’s boss until 2004 (now an Amazon board member): Steve spent a lot of time in the studio because it was his happy place. Running the business wasn’t as much fun as hanging around with the design team.

  SATZGER: Steve told us he wanted an Internet computer. His daughter was going to college, and he wanted to develop a computer that he felt was good enough for her to take to school. He had this idea for a product that didn’t need a hard drive.

  RUBINSTEIN: The network computer just didn’t work. There wasn’t enough bandwidth. The original design looked like a shrunk-down version of what became the iMac. It had a tunnel underneath where you could put the keyboard, because there was almost nothing inside it.

  KEN SEGALL, creative director, Chiat/Day (now a writer and consultant): When we first saw the iMac prototype, it was shocking. Somebody lifted a cloth and you could see the guts of the computer. It looked like a cartoon version of the future.

  TIM KOBE, cofounder, Eight Inc., an architecture firm that initially worked on display designs at Macworld conferences (now works on the design of the Apple Stores): Steve said, “All it takes is for the word color to get out, and we’re screwed.” He was really sensitive to the fact that that core idea—that it had color and a personality—was a shift in thinking.

  SATZGER: We delivered the Bondi Blue iMac, and as soon as Steve got offstage after the announcement, he said, “I love the iMac, but we just delivered it in the wrong color.”

  TRIP HAWKINS, former marketing and product manager, Apple Lisa group (later founder of Electronic Arts): I was like, “Man, he managed to make a monitor look sexy.” No one had done that, ever.

  The iMac, which was offered in five candy colors, was a hit, the first computer that felt like a consumer product and not a business appliance. The next step in Jobs’s companywide redesign was software.

  LINDSAY: Shortly before the unveiling of the iMac, Steve turned his attention to the user experience on the Mac OS X. He hauled the entire software design team into a room, and in typical Steve style, he just declared everybody in the room to be an idiot.

  RATZLAFF: It went downhill from there. We spent the next few weeks working night and day building a prototype of what we wanted Mac OS X to be. We started by thinking about every other operating system out there. They were all big, dark, gloomy, and chunky. Our approach was, Let’s do the exact opposite. In that prototype, there were the initial ideas for the dock, the Mac as your digital
hub, a completely new color scheme, and the animations.

  LINDSAY: Steve was taking his knowledge from the hardware, which at the time was about translucency and glossiness and color, and he was bringing that to bear on the interface.

  RATZLAFF: We’d meet with Steve on Tuesday afternoons. He would come up with the craziest ideas. At one point, Steve wanted to do all of our error messages as haikus. He would leave, and we would all think, What is he smoking?

  In one of our meetings, Steve said, “I want this to look good enough to lick.” After that, one of the designers stuck a half-sucked Life Saver to his monitor.

  The new user-interface system was known as Aqua. Using a fixed dock on the bottom of the screen and relying heavily on visual metaphors and animation, it would evolve into the modern versions of both OS X and iOS while exerting an obvious influence on operating systems offered by Microsoft, Google, and pretty much every other major software company.

  2000: “He Wanted to Control Everything That Touched His Product”

  DAN WALKER, chief talent officer (now an HR consultant): I was in my kitchen in Orange County, and my wife answers the phone and says, “Sure, he’s right here.” She hands me the phone and says, “It’s Steve Jobs.” He said, “Mickey Drexler is on our board of directors, and he told me that I should give you a call because I’m thinking about opening retail stores for the Apple brand. Would you come up and talk to me?” [Walker had worked with Drexler at Gap.]

  I went to the fourth floor of the Loop. The side opposite the elevators, that’s where Steve dwelled. Valhalla. He told me that he was creating a premium product that really needed to have a story told. He wanted to control everything that touched his product—the creation, the manufacturing, how it went to market, and how the customer interacted with it.