[6] In February 2012, Heffernan became a national correspondent for Yahoo News,[7] where she covered the 2012 presidential election and wrote about subjects related to media, technology, politics, and culture.

[8] Heffernan is a regular contributor to The New York Times, as well as The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Mother Jones, Politico, and many other publications.

[11] In July 2013, Heffernan published an article entitled "Why I'm a creationist,"[12] saying she was "considerably less amused and moved by the character-free Big Bang story ("something exploded") than by the twisted and picturesque misadventures of Eve and Adam.

[16] In 2014 Ben Yagoda in the Chronicle of Higher Education named Heffernan among his top candidates for "best living writer of English prose.

In it, she evaluated and critiqued the presidency of Donald Trump, interviewing guests like Yascha Mounk, Fareed Zakaria, David Corn and more.

[26] Heffernan has been online since the age of ten, when she used a Zenith computer terminal and dial-up modem at home to play a MUD at Dartmouth College.

[29] The book was well received, earning a starred Kirkus review[30] and appearing on the summer reading lists of Gwyneth Paltrow and Lenny Letter.

"[34] In The New Yorker, Louis Menand wrote that "Heffernan is smart, her writing has flair, she can refer intelligently to Barthes, Derrida, and Benjamin—also to Aquinas, Dante, and Proust—and she knows a lot about the Internet and its history.