Welcome.
This is Magic + Loss. I’m Virginia Heffernan.
This newsletter covers politics and tech for English majors. If it’s got George Eliot and Matt Gaetz and a Roomba in it, it’s probably something I would write. Or would wish I’d written.
Here you’ll also find every episode of What Rough Beast, the podcast where Stephen Metcalf and I and some fascinating guests take the measure of America’s demise under MAGA; try to fathom what a “demise” is; and imagine in real-time what can be built from the rubble.
Surely civilization has some bigger ideas in store for us than Donald Trump.
The media is, what’s the word, changing. MAGA-aligned newspaper owners have salted the earth. You can still find my work, old and new, in Wired, The New York Times, Politico, The Economist, The LA Times, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Vogue, MSNBC, CNN, Yahoo News, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Fast Company, The Wall Street Journal, places that are out of business, you name it.
But it’s 2025, and I might not be returning to some of these joints.
I’ve hosted four podcasts before What Rough Beast: This Is Critical with Stitcher, The Continuous Action with POGO, After Trump, with Lawfare, and Trumpcast, with Slate.
In 2016, I published Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art, from which this newsletter takes its name. In 2003 Mike Albo let me have a credit on our semi-cult novel, The Underminer. I miss the year we wrote that book together every day.
Quick background: After getting a doctorate in English from Harvard, I began my journalism career as a fact-checker at The New Yorker. I’ve worked as a senior editor at Harper’s, a TV critic for Slate, a TV critic for The New York Times, and a columnist for The New York Times Magazine. I’ve also written columns on culture, tech, and politics for Fast Company, Yahoo News, The Economist’s 1843, and Wired.
Why subscribe?
Excitingly, this newsletter is now my chief source of income. It would thus be amazing to have you as a paid subscriber! So what’s in for you? You get full access to the podcast and the newsletter. Disturbing Bromances? The Edgar Allan Poe Streak in American Politics? The Trucklers? Never miss an update.
Keep au courant
With a subscription, you won’t have to worry about missing anything. Every new episode of the podcast and edition of the newsletter goes directly to your inbox. You’ll get to comment on anything and mix it up with our Magic + Loss cohort. We’ll stay in touch.
Join the crew
Be part of a talkative, convivial, surprisingly hilarious community of English majors. And history majors. And classicists. And engineers and marketing executives who are secretly passionate about Haruki Murakami or Eileen Myles or James Joyce. English is plainly the best major but, if you studied something more remunerative or useful, the next best thing is this newsletter. Join us!
