Virginia Heffernan is a journalist, critic and author, most recently, of MAGIC AND LOSS: The Internet as Art (Simon & Schuster, 2016). She is a contributing editor at POLITICO, a cohost of Slate's Trumpcast podcast, and a columnist at FastCompany. Heffernan has been called "America's preeminent cultural critic," "a public intellectual for the 21st century," and among the "finest living writers of English prose." Edward Mendelson in The New York Review of Books called MAGIC AND LOSS, "surprisingly moving...an ecstatic narrative of submission." Kevin Kelly, the co-founder of WIRED, writes, "Heffernan is a new species of wizard. It is a joy and a revelation to be under her spell."

From 2008 to 2012, Heffernan wrote "The Medium," a weekly column about Internet culture, for The New York Times Magazine.  Before introducing the column, Heffernan spent four years as a television critic at the daily New York Times, where, in addition to writing reviews and features, she chronicled the convergence of television and the Internet. In 2002, she received a Ph.D. in English and American literature from Harvard, where her dissertation was on financial dynamics in American novels. Before that, she served as articles editor at Talk Magazine, senior editor at Harper’s Magazine, and television critic for Slate. From 2012 to 2014, she was the national correspondent at Yahoo News. From 2015-2016, she was a Visiting Scholar in the department of Media, Culture and Communications at NYU, and editorial director of West, a venture-capital firm in San Francisco. She still consults with VCs and startups.

Heffernan has also written for The New Yorker, Mother Jones, New York Magazine, Salon, MTV, POLITICO, VICE, WIRED, The LA Times, The Wall Street Journal, Marie Claire, Glamour, The Message, New York Magazine, Matter, and many other publications. She has appeared on The Open Mind, 20/20, CNBC, MSNBC, and regularly on NPR. As an academic and a journalist, Heffernan has lectured and keynoted at Google, The Library of Congress, Oberlin, The New York Public Library, Princeton, Dartmouth, Ohio University, Harvard, Union College, NYU, The Savannah College of Art and Design, The National Gallery of the Arts, and Boston College, among many other institutions, universities, and corporations.