About Virginia Heffernan:
Virginia Heffernan is an American journalist. From 2003 to 2011, she was 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. Heffernan writes as a cultural critic, with particular attention to digital culture. She 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." Since 2014, Heffernan has been a Visiting Scholar in Media, Communications and Culture at NYU and a regular contributor to Backchannel and The Message, both writing collectives housed on The Medium website. She currently writes a monthly column on language for The New York Times Magazine called "First Words".