MeMelissa Lafsky is a 31-year-old writer/reformed lawyer living in Brooklyn. She grew up in the D.C. area, got a B.A. from Dartmouth College and weaseled her way into the University of Virginia Law School. After graduating somewhere smack in the middle of her class, she worked for a couple large and bloated NYC law firms and then, in 2005, had the less-than-advisable idea to start blogging about her job as a lawyer. The blog was discovered by Gawker, which back then was a big deal for a blog (really, we swear).

By December of 2005, the blog had been written about in a smorgasbord of fancy-sounding places like the New York Times, the New York Post, the Harvard Law Record, the ABA Journal, Newsday and many legal blogs. MLafsky-PictureWebDaily traffic topped 30,000 visitors (which back then was a lot, we swear). Lafsky started getting fan/hate mail, requests for legal advice, solicitations for sex (mostly unpaid), and anonymous threats to reveal her identity and get her fired.

Ten months and over three million visitors since the blog’s inception, she resigned from her job as a lawyer in order to avoid embarrassing herself and others. In need of rent money, and something to do, she turned to a second career in media. After a stint as an associate editor at the Huffington Post, she spent a year as the editor of the New York Times‘ Freakonomics blog, and then as deputy web editor of Discover magazine. She is currently the editor in chief of Infrastructurist.com, a freelancer for papers, mags and websites, and the author of a column about horror movies for The Awl.

Photography by Kwaku Alston