Virginia Heffernan (@page88) is a contributor at WIRED. She is the author of Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art. Before coming to WIRED she was a staff writer at The New York Times—first a TV critic, then a magazine columnist, and then an opinion writer. She has a PhD in English from Harvard. In 1979 she stumbled onto the internet, when it was the back office of weird clerics, and she’s been in the thunderdome ever since.