The Best American Magazine Writing 2014

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  The iPhone would become the most successful Apple product of all time, accounting for more than half its revenue. Over the next few years, Ive’s team would crank out a succession of refinements—and the company would return to the original idea it had for a multitouch device: a tablet computer.

  GANATRA: I first heard about this tablet in late 2008. Steve was saying, “Just think of it as a big iPod Touch.” It was one of the few times that Steve was arguing that we didn’t have to do that much work.

  MATT MACINNIS, marketing manager: There’s no magic to the product planning cycle at Apple beyond a ruthless focus on a limited set of use cases. What each product does in the first iteration is going to be narrow, but those things are going to be airtight. For the iPad, there were ideas about having docks on two sides. Depending on where you put it in your house, it would behave differently. If you put it on its side by your bed, it would be an alarm clock. But if you put it upright in the kitchen, it’d be a recipe book. Those got cut back.

  SEGALL: Back in the Apple II days, they had a tagline, the “most personal computer.” But this, the iPad, is really the most personal computer ever made. I mean, you touch it. It responds to your voice.

  2010: “It Started as This Green Felt Thing”

  In the years following the launch of the iPad, there were no major new product releases, and competitors such as Samsung and Google started catching up to Apple with their own touch-screen phones and tablets. A sense of drift was perhaps best epitomized by Game Center, a social networking app for iPhone games released in September 2010. Game Center took Jobs’s preference for visual metaphors and realistic 3-D icons—known as skeuomorphism—to garish new extremes.

  GANATRA: Game Center was a rough one. All the faults with skeuomorphism were front and center. It started as this green felt thing, and they struggled to come up with something that was a true metaphor.

  JASON WILSON, senior UI designer (now lead product designer, Pinterest): Forstall took Steve’s design taste without understanding the sensibilities behind it. I left Apple because I couldn’t stand the design under Forstall.

  GANATRA: A lot of the press latched on to the fact that Forstall was the guy who was really pushing skeuomorphism. The truth is, it was Steve. He would look at wood and leathers, and there would be these extensive reviews of materials just to see what would look best on the calendar app or the bookshelf app.

  ZWERNER: The hardest thing at Apple is recruiting. You are going to the best designers in the world and saying, “Can you imagine coming to Apple and putting pictures of things on white, with one line of typography—for years?” I really admire the people who stayed there, and their ability to see the big picture. Steve saw this as kind of a life’s work. And the question is, in the absence of that careful management, that thread that ties everything together, how will it stay intact?

  With Jobs’s death in 2011, Apple’s software problems only seemed to get worse. The release of a new version of Apple Maps, which had nice visuals but had highly publicized problems directing users to the right location, prompted a public apology from CEO Tim Cook. The debacle reportedly led to Forstall’s resignation in October 2012. Ive, who had rarely had any input in Apple’s software decisions, took over for Forstall and began working on an ambitious redesign of iOS.

  MACINNIS: One of the key ingredients in Amazon, Facebook, and Google is data. Those businesses were built on deep technical understanding of how to manage swaths of data. Apple doesn’t know how to do that.

  WILSON: The software has been falling off. The web services have all been failures. And Google is kicking ass.

  This past June at its Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple unveiled Ive’s new modernist reworking of iOS 7, which includes a new gesture-based interaction model; a futuristic Mac Pro desktop; and, perhaps most important, a sense of swagger. “We completely ran out of green felt,” quipped Craig Federighi, senior VP of software engineering. “Can’t innovate anymore, my ass,” groused Phil Schiller, Apple’s marketing chief.

  SEGALL: Surprise was always an important factor to Steve. That’s the feeling I get from the new Mac Pro. I look at that and think of the G4 Cube. Apple will probably get slammed for it, but the way it opens up, the turbine fan, and the thermal core—it’s very Apple. Who on earth but Apple would redesign a desktop computer? That makes me feel good about Apple as an innovator.

  BRICHTER: I have nitpicks with iOS 7, but I’m really happy they did something big. It’s more than just the veneer. The way they’re reimplementing the UI framework with physics—it just feels natural. They’re mimicking the real world. So in a way, the skeuomorphism, which was previously going into visual design, is now going into interaction design.

  2013: “Apple Branches, Grafted Onto New Trees”

  BRODY, now working on a stealth startup: I watched WWDC online, and they were all trying so hard. But for me, Apple is a different place without Steve. It’s a good place, but it’s different. What really makes me happy is to see people like Tony Fadell doing new things. They’re like Apple branches, grafted onto new trees.

  FADELL, now CEO, Nest: At Apple, we were always asking, What else can we revolutionize? We looked at video cameras and remote controls. The craziest thing we talked about was something like Google Glass. We said, “What if we make visors, so it’s like you’re sitting in a theater?” I built a bunch of those prototypes. But we had such success with the things we were already doing that we didn’t have time.

  MACINNIS, now founder, Inkling, an e-book publisher: Visual design and interaction design are things I learned at Apple. Marketing, branding—I learned a lot of that at Apple. What I have learned since I’ve left is that confidentiality doesn’t work. If you try to replicate it, you just look like an asshole.

  KUEMPEL, former intern (now founder, Blossom Coffee, manufacturer of an $11,000 coffeemaker): I worked on the iPad SIM-card ejector. It’s got a really nice click. You’re welcome, world. There were opportunities to stay at Apple, but I didn’t want to because I realized that I wouldn’t be designing a product—I’d be designing a SIM ejector. I wanted to create whole products and define an industry in the way that the iPad created the tablet market.

  DAVE MORIN, former Apple marketing manager (now cofounder, Path, a mobile social-networking app): The pursuit of quality above all else is something we aspire to learn from Apple and that drives us at Path.

  PHIL LIBIN, CEO, Evernote, a note-taking app: There had always been products that had been beautifully designed. But they were high end, and very few people actually owned them. Apple was the first company that took high design and made it mainstream. It taught the world taste.

  HAWKINS: In 500 years, Steve Jobs will be the only guy from our generation that anybody knows about.

  GADI AMIT, founder, NewDealDesign (designer of the Fitbit activity tracker and the Lytro camera): Around 1990, I was in Israel, working at a company called Scitex, but I was spending a lot of time at the Frog Design office in San Francisco. The guy next to me was working on NeXT for Steve Jobs. I saw three identical mice on his desk, and I couldn’t tell the difference between them, so I asked. He said, “Can’t you see?” And he pointed to the bottom plate of the mouse. One was 1 millimeter thick, one was 1.5 millimeters, the other 2 millimeters. And then I saw the difference—and it transformed my worldview about details in design. That’s the reason I moved to California.

  That is Apple’s contribution: this dogmatic, beautiful, striving for perfection, that chasing for the last millimeter. It drove the world of design to a completely new level.

  Additional reporting by Skylar Bergl, Austin Carr, and Mark Wilson.

  New York Times Magazine

  WINNER—REPORTING

  Luke Mogelson’s work earned two National Magazine Award nominations for Reporting this year. His story “The River Martyrs,” about the Syrian civil war, was one of six New Yorker entries to be nominated in 2014 (five New Yorker pieces are included in this anthology), but it was this
story for the New York Times Magazine, then edited by Hugo Lindgren, that won the award. Posing as a Georgian asylum seeker, Mogelson joined dozens of refugees on a 200-mile open-boat voyage from Indonesia to Australia. The publication of “The Dream Boat” was further distinguished by the work of the photojournalist Joel van Houdt, who accompanied Mogelson throughout the reporting of this story. Mogelson was not yet thirty years old when “The Dream Boat” was written.

  Luke Mogelson

  The Dream Boat

  It’s about a two-and-a-half-hour drive, normally, from Indonesia’s capital city, Jakarta, to the southern coast of Java. In one of the many trucks that make the trip each month, loaded with asylum seekers from the Middle East and Central Asia, it takes a little longer. From the bed of the truck, the view is limited to a night sky punctuated by fleeting glimpses of high-rise buildings, overpasses, traffic signs, and tollbooths. It is difficult to make out, among the human cargo, much more than the vague shapes of bodies, the floating tips of cigarettes. When you pass beneath a street lamp, though, or an illuminated billboard, the faces thrown into relief are all alive with expectation. Eventually, the urban pulse subsides; the commotion of the freeway fades. The drooping wires give way to darkly looming palms. You begin to notice birds, and you can smell the sea.

  In September, in one of these trucks, I sat across from a recently married couple in their twenties, from Tehran. The wife, who was seven months pregnant, wore a red blouse stretched over her stomach; the husband a tank top, thick-rimmed glasses and a faux hawk that revealed a jagged scar (courtesy, he said, of the Iranian police). Two months had passed since they flew to Jakarta; this was their fourth attempt to leave. Twice, en route to the boat that would bring them to Australia, they were intercepted and detained and paid bribes for their release. Another time, the boat foundered shortly after starting out. All the same, they were confident this trip would be different. Like everyone else’s in the truck, theirs was a desperate kind of faith. “Tonight we will succeed,” the husband assured me. They were determined that the child be born “there.”

  Our drive coincided with a violent tropical downpour that seemed to surge, under pressure, more than fall. Each asylum seeker had brought a small bag with spare clothes and provisions. Those who packed slickers dug them out. The storm was amusing at first, then just cold and miserable. The children, who earlier delighted in our clandestine exit from the city, now clung to their parents. An old man, sitting cross-legged beside me with a plastic garbage bag on his head, shivered uncontrollably, muttering prayers.

  Around three in the morning, the truck braked and reversed down a rutted dirt road. The rain had stopped as abruptly as it started. No one spoke. We knew we had arrived. The rear hatch swung open, and we piled out. A second truck was parked behind us; people were emerging from it as well. We were in a dense jungle whose tangled canopy obstructed the moon. Several Indonesians corralled the crowd and whispered fiercely to keep moving. “Go! Go!” they urged in English. The road led down a steep hill and ended at a narrow footpath. As people stumbled in the dark, the Indonesians prodded them along. At the bottom of the foot-path was a beach. It appeared as a pale hue through the trees, its white sand giving off a glow. The asylum seekers, fifty-seven of them, huddled at the jungle’s edge.

  We were in the shelter of a wide bay, its arcing headlands, dotted with lights, repulsing the windward waves. Two open-hull skiffs with outboard motors idled offshore, bobbing gently in the swells. Behind us, the clamor of the truck grew distant and was gone. Suddenly, the Indonesians began pushing people toward the sea.

  “You, you. Go!”

  Two at a time, the asylum seekers raised their bags above their heads and waded out. The cool water rose to waists and armpits. It was a struggle to climb aboard. Whenever someone had to be hauled up, the skiff pitched steeply, threatening to tip.

  We were ferried to a wooden fishing boat: a more substantial vessel than the skiffs, though not much. About thirty feet long, with open decks, a covered bow, a one-man cockpit, and a bamboo tiller, it was clearly not designed for passengers. Noting the absence of cabin, bridge, bulkheads, and benches, I wondered whether anyone else shared my deluded hope: that there was another, larger ship anchored somewhere farther out and that this sad boat was merely to convey us there.

  With frantic miming, the two-man Indonesian crew directed us to crowd together on the deck and crouch beneath the bulwarks. They stretched a tarp above our heads and nailed its edges to the gunwales. Packed close in the ripe air beneath the tarp, hugging knees to chests, we heard the engine start and felt the boat begin to dip and rise.

  • • •

  Our destination was an Australian territory, more than 200 miles across the Indian Ocean, called Christmas Island. If the weather is amenable, if the boat holds up, the trip typically lasts three days. Often, however, the weather is tempestuous, and the boat sinks. Over the past decade, it is believed that more than a thousand asylum seekers have drowned. The unseaworthy vessels are swamped through leaky hulls, capsize in heavy swells, splinter on the rocks. Survivors sometimes drift for days. Children have watched their parents drown, and parents their children. Entire families have been lost. Since June, several boats went down, claiming the lives of more than a hundred people.

  I first heard about the passage from Indonesia to Australia in Afghanistan, where I live and where one litmus test for the success of the U.S.-led war now drawing to a close is the current exodus of civilians from the country. (The first “boat people” to seek asylum in Australia were Vietnamese, in the mid-1970s, driven to the ocean by the fallout from that American withdrawal.) Last year, nearly 37,000 Afghans applied for asylum abroad, the most since 2001. Afghans who can afford to will pay as much as $24,000 for European travel documents and up to $40,000 for Canadian. (Visas to the United States, generally, cannot be bought.) Others employ smugglers for arduous overland treks from Iran to Turkey to Greece, or from Russia to Belarus to Poland.

  The Indonesia-Australia route first became popular in Afghanistan before September 11, mostly among Hazaras, a predominantly Shiite ethnic minority that was systematically brutalized by the Taliban. After the Taliban were overthrown, many refugees, anticipating an enduring peace, returned to Afghanistan, and for a while the number of Afghans willing to risk their lives at sea declined. But by late 2009—with Afghans, disabused of their optimism, fleeing once more—migration to Australia escalated. At the same time, Hazaras living across the border in Pakistan, many of whom moved there from Afghanistan, have also found relocation necessary. In a sectarian crusade of murder and terror being waged against them by Sunni extremists, Hazara civilians in the Pakistani city of Quetta are shot in the streets, executed en masse, and indiscriminately massacred by rockets and bombs.

  In 2010, a suicide attacker killed more than seventy people at a Shiite rally in Quetta. Looming directly above the carnage was a large billboard paid for by the Australian government. In Dari, next to an image of a distressed Indonesian fishing boat carrying Hazara asylum seekers, read the words: “All illegal routes to Australia are closed to Afghans.” The billboard was part of a wideranging effort by Australia to discourage refugees from trying to get to Christmas Island. In Afghanistan, a recent Australian-funded TV ad featured a Hazara actor rubbing his eyes before a black background. “Please don’t go,” the man gloomily implores over melancholic music. “Many years of my life were wasted there [in detention] until my application for asylum was rejected.” In addition to the messaging campaign (and the hard-line policies it alludes to), Australia has worked to disrupt smuggling networks by collaborating with Pakistan’s notorious intelligence services, embedding undercover agents in Indonesia, and offering up to $180,000 for information resulting in a smuggler’s arrest. The most drastic deterrence measure was introduced this July, when the Australian prime minister at the time, Kevin Rudd, announced that henceforth no refugee who reaches Australia by boat would be settled there. Instead, refugees would be detained and event
ually resettled in impoverished Papua New Guinea. Several weeks later, the resettlement policy was extended to a tiny island state in Micronesia called the Republic of Nauru.

  Since then, there have been more boats, more drownings. In late September, a vessel came apart shortly after leaving Indonesia, and dozens of asylum seekers—from Lebanon, Iran and Iraq—drowned. That people are willing to hazard death at sea despite Australia’s vow to send them to places like Papua New Guinea and the Republic of Nauru would seem illogical—or just plain crazy. The Australian government ascribes their persistence partly to misinformation propagated by the smugglers. But every asylum seeker who believes those lies believes them because he chooses to. Their doing so, and continuing to brave the Indian Ocean, and continuing to die, only illustrates their desperation in a new, disturbing kind of light. This is the subtext to the plight of every refugee: Whatever hardship he endures, he endures because it beats the hardship he escaped. Every story of exile implies the sadder story of a homeland.

  • • •

  It’s surprisingly simple, from Kabul, to enlist the services of the smugglers Australian authorities are so keen to apprehend. The problem was that every Afghan I spoke to who had been to Indonesia insisted that no Western journalist would ever be allowed onto a boat: paranoia over agents was too high. Consequently, the photographer Joel van Houdt and I decided to pose as refugees. Because we are both white, we thought it prudent to devise a cover. We would say we were Georgian (other options in the region were rejected for fear of running into Russian speakers), had sensitive information about our government’s activities during the 2008 war (hence, in the event of a search, our cameras and recorders), traveled to Kabul in search of a smuggler, and learned some Dari during our stay. An Afghan colleague of mine, Hakim (whose name has been changed to protect his identity), would pretend to be a local schemer angling for a foothold in the trade. It was all overly elaborate and highly implausible.