Virginia Heffernan’s Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art reveals the logic and aesthetics behind the Internet. Since its inception, the Internet has morphed from merely an extension of traditional media into its own full-fledged civilization. But its deep logic, its cultural potential, and its societal impact often elude us. Just as Susan Sontag did for photography and Marshall McLuhan did for television, an original and far-reaching analysis of what the Internet is and does.
Virginia Heffernan is a regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine. She began writing for the Times in 2003—first as a television critic in the Arts section, then as an Internet columnist at the Sunday Magazine. The coauthor (with Mike Albo) of the comic novel The Underminer, she has been an editor at Harper’s and Talk magazines and has written for the New Yorker, Mother Jones, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, Backchannel, The Message, and Slate, where she was that magazine’s first television critic. She has a PhD in English from Harvard.
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