“What can be built from the rubble?” Virginia Heffernan launches a forward-thinking podcast for the Trump 2.0 era
The veteran journalist co-hosts What Rough Beast, a show that posits the American experiment has failed and wonders what comes next.
The day after the 2024 US presidential election, journalist Virginia Heffernan published a Los Angeles Times opinion piece entitled “Elon Musk bought himself a starring role in Trump’s second term. What could go wrong?” A month later, Oliver Darcy reported in Status that the LA Times’s billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, had “expressed dismay” over the headline, and instituted a new rule: “Prior to publishing opinion stories, the headlines must be emailed over to Soon-Shiong, where he can then choose to weigh in.” This “highly unusual” move came in the wake of Soon-Shiong scuttling the newspaper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris.
Wealthy publishers siding with Donald Trump is an extremely troubling trend (see: Bezos, Jeff). “That’s why I’m trying to get used to thinking of the American experiment as over so that we can think about something new, instead of desperately trying to save the LA Times,” Heffernan tells Depth Perception. (She says “it remains to be seen” whether she’ll write for the paper again.)
That mindset is what led her to launch a new, independent podcast with co-host Stephen Metcalf. It’s called What Rough Beast, and it’s a sequel of sorts to her popular Slate podcast Trumpcast. Heffernan calls the show, whose early guests include the New Yorker’s Patrick Radden Keefe and New York magazine’s Liz Weil, “an invitation to the imagination.” The weekly podcast asks some big questions about the dark new era that Trump, Musk, et al. are ushering in, she says: “What might we save from the world before? And what can be built from the rubble?”
The Brooklyn-based Heffernan, a veteran of the New York Times who currently contributes to Wired, recently agreed to answer Depth Perception’s Leading Questions. The following has been edited for length and clarity. —Mark Yarm
What prompted you to get into journalism?
I did a PhD at Harvard in English, and while I was in Boston, I just couldn’t make the money work. So I started taking jobs at [alt-weekly] the Boston Phoenix, where I wrote about Boston club kids and all kinds of books. When I came to New York on a break from working on the PhD, I was working in a bookstore in the East Village called Chapter and Verse, and a guy named Rob Boynton, who is a journalist, came in and saw me reading Janet Malcolm’s book and chatted me up. He said, “Oh, you should consider getting out of this nightshift at the bookstore” — where I was working till 3 a.m. — “and go over to the New Yorker, where they need a fact checker.” So I worked there for a year. I slowly found my way to TV criticism, which grew out of training to be a critic in graduate school.
What story of yours are you the proudest of?
A piece that came out in Wired [in 2023] called “I Saw the Face of God in a Semiconductor Factory” about the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC, the company that people are talking about when they refer to the “silicon shield” that keeps Taiwan safe from Chinese aggressions. It’s such an exquisitely precise, state-of-the-art, almost otherworldly set of fabricators that quite literally etch on top of atoms. It’s just a monumental achievement of humankind. The CEO is quite religious. The head of R&D is quite religious. And they really see themselves as up against the face of nature — very, very close to the building blocks of all existence.
What story of yours do you most regret?
I don’t think I should be doing any kind of predictions or prophecies. Like, at the New York Times, I said that Two and a Half Men would never last, and it lasted for [12] seasons. I watched one episode and said, “This is the worst thing that will ever be.” And then I predicted — maybe it was wishful thinking — that Kamala Harris would win. I don’t want to get into the bookmaking business.
What is the best journalistic career advice you ever received?
“Keep your voice” was something Bill Keller told me at the New York Times when I first got there. He said that there’d be a lot of incentives to flatten your voice. I remember wanting to use the word chthonic, and it was a little bit of a heavy lift to persuade people it’s a word worth using. There are lots of competing interests, including keeping things short and readable and all those things, and so sometimes keeping your voice can come last.
What is the worst journalistic career advice you ever received?
“Oh, don’t worry. Just get tenure at the New York Times, and you’ll never have to worry about work again.” Though I did get a union job there, the Times suffered setbacks and we were offered buyouts. And, in the middle of a divorce, I had to take a higher-paying job at Yahoo! News. So the idea that I would just coast with tenure and die at my desk like William Safire was probably not a very good thing to hope for.
What’s the most controversial story you ever wrote?
The most meaningfully controversial one was one where I probably should have lost my voice more. It was called “Why I’m a creationist,” and it was an effort at Yahoo! News to be funny, believe it or not, because Bertrand Russell had written this essay called “Why I Am Not a Christian.” Creationism just seemed like such a kind of slightly ludicrous thing to believe in. I thought maybe this would be a chance to connect with my new Yahoo! Christian readers and make this kind of funny case. Anyway, it was a disaster, and it was a disaster with the left. Ultimately, I had my contract dropped at Yahoo! for that piece.
Having later gotten death threats from the Tucker Carlson crew and been trolled many times by the right, I have a very clear idea of the difference. The horrible thing about the right is that they really will use rape imagery, lynching imagery, gas chamber imagery. They’ll say anything to upset your equilibrium. They’ll get your phone number, they’ll get your home address, they'll write you handwritten notes, like a card that says “Thank You” on the front and then, on the inside: “...FOR BEING SUCH A BITCH, VIRGINIA!” It’s really unnerving, but it’s much worse when the left doesn't like you, because they can materially take away your job and reputation.
“The idea that I would just coast with tenure and die at my desk like William Safire was probably not a very good thing to hope for.” — Virginia Heffernan
If you could write an all-access profile of anyone in the world, who would it be?
Aleksandr Dugin, who’s Putin's guru. Tucker Carlson has interviewed him. He’s extremely rightwing, obviously. He embodies this extraordinarily conservative vision of how the world might be. I think it would be pretty hard, not being an alpha male, to get access to him, but it would be really, really interesting to find out what makes him tick, because he seems like such an odd, evil overlord. You could get a novel out of it. You could get a movie out of it. It just seems like it would be infinitely rewarding.
Speaking of that, which article of yours should be made into a movie?
I’ve had two pieces of mine optioned. One of them was a Wired story about a marketing job I did in San Francisco that was briefly optioned by HBO for a comedy. And the piece I mentioned about TSMC has served, in my mind, as a backdrop for a really great spy story. I wrote a treatment for it, which was briefly optioned. My agent and producer still have some hope for it. So if your readers are interested in a thriller set in the world of semiconductors in Taiwan, then I’m your person.
What is a story/book/movie/podcast that you wish you had created or written?
I just finished John [Jeremiah] Sullivan's book Pulphead, again. It’s a 2011 collection of his magazine journalism. And it’s almost like a swan song for a certain kind of super-voicey magazine journalism. It’s just indescribably moving. He’s a friend. We were at Harper’s together a long time ago, and I had reconnected with him. [Sullivan recorded the theme song for What Rough Beast.] Rereading it, I was just chortling audibly to myself.
What makes you hopeful for the future of journalism?
I do like the idea of thinking of an experiment as being over. I mean, some of them succeed for a long time and then fail. I’m a person who’s divorced, and when I got divorced, it was really important to me to think that a marriage is not a success if it goes “Till death do you part” and an absolute failure if it ends at any point before then. There’s something unhappy-making to me about thinking that we have to keep pretending it’s working. The same with the American experiment. For some reason, I get a lot of hope from thinking we might draw a line under this republic and try to imagine what might come next.
It may be something of a cliché, but I’ll point to social media, and in particular, TikTok. Like the collective reinterpretation of the Menendez brothers [on TikTok], which has managed to possibly get them a retrial and released from prison. And also this group of young people who have become really interested in Luigi Mangione. People on TikTok are documenting their dissatisfaction with democracy, which would seem to be a beginning of trying to make something new.
We should keep our eyes open for what is already happening. Like, there may be forms of solidarity in new mutual aid movements in New York City or in places where we don’t expect it. We might want it to be in the unions, but maybe it’s not. I don’t want to think, Oh, I really wish this op ed page was exactly like it was in 1975 when this other really interesting thing is going on down the block, or going on in Des Moines, Iowa, or whatever. I never want to be just a fearsome archivist, having this antiquarian interest in preserving old forms if there are new forms.
Further reading from Virginia Heffernan
“I Saw the Face of God in a Semiconductor Factory” (Wired, March 21, 2023)
“Opinion: Elon Musk bought himself a starring role in Trump’s second term. What could go wrong?” (The Los Angeles Times, Nov. 6, 2024)
“Media Circles Drain” (Magic + Loss, Dec. 6, 2024)
“Marissa Mayer: I Am Not a Feminist. I Am Not Neurodivergent. I Am a Software Girl” (Wired, Oct. 17, 2024)
“Breaking the World” (Magic + Loss, Nov. 24, 2024)
I'll try this if there are transcripts.