Virginia Heffernan Biography

Virginia Heffernan (born August 8, 1969) is an American journalist and cultural critic. She has worked as a staff writer for The New York Times — first as a TV critic, then as a magazine columnist, and then as an opinion writer. She has also worked as a senior editor for Harper's, a founding editor of Talk, a TV critic for Slate, a fact checker for The New Yorker and a national correspondent for Yahoo News. Her 2016 book Magic and Loss: The Internet As Art argues that the Internet is a "massive and collective work of art" and a "work in progress", and that the suggested deterioration of attention spans in response to it is a myth. Heffernan is known as a playful, stylish and erudite writer; in 2014 Ben Yagoda in the Chronicle of Higher Education named her among his top candidates for "best living writer of English prose", and she has been called "one of the mothers of the Internet".