Virginia Heffernan’s Sonic Deep Dives Into Pop Culture
On her podcast This Is Critical, the seasoned journalist tackles subjects including the militant history of yoga, manners, and the art of removing body hair.
By Jack Meyer
May 11, 2022
4 minute read
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Virginia Heffernan is concerned. The seasoned journalist (who was the guest on Ep. 5 of our At a Distance podcast, in 2020) spent the better part of the last four years co-hosting Slate’s Trumpcast, a podcast dedicated to the Sisyphean task of preventing the normalization of the former president’s actions. During this time, Heffernan saw a political left so occupied with responding to the ever-more concerning behavior wriggling out from under the emboldened right that they inadvertently ceded much of the cultural conversation to the droning microphones of the relatively unconcerned center-right, or the “apolitical.” Commentary from the Rogans, Shapiros, and Petersons of the world—with their MMA zeal, not-so-surprisingly restrictive definitions of what constitutes music, and endorsements of all-meat diets—ran through the ears of the curious masses.
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