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Virginia Heffernan

Virginia Heffernan wrote Ring of Fire: High-Stakes Mining in a Lowlands Wilderness.

Articles by
Virginia Heffernan

Hard Core

Viola MacMillan knew the drill April 2025
When Viola MacMillan died of a heart attack on her way to the bank in the summer of 1993, her executors set to work clearing out her home. They found hidden in the attic a ghostwritten autobiography that she’d kept secret. MacMillan was one of the most intriguing women in Canadian history. Born in 1903, the thirteenth of fifteen children of a…

A Charged Topic

From ore to your pocket and automobile October 2023
One of the features of mining is that it occurs mostly in places so remote from our increasingly urban landscapes as to be almost ­unimaginable. Massive operations blast and dig through ­bedrock the world over, from the mountainous, steaming jungles of New Guinea and the briny flats of South America to the frozen reaches of eastern…