Looking to give up her day job but maintain a steady income, the author joined a Web site where rich older men shop for girlfriends. Is that so wrong?

When Melanie Berliet joined an elite investment bank as one of a handful of female traders, she decided to play the sex card with her boss.

Curious to know what kind of men use the Internet to find extramarital lovers, journalist Melanie Berliet posed as a wayward wife on the social-networking site Ashley Madison (tagline: “Life is short. Have an affair”). Her encounters with three suitors suggest that marriage and monogamy needn’t always go hand in hand.

Cosmetic surgery is now so popular that even young, healthy, attractive women are choosing to be “enhanced.” In a quest for insight into this $13 billion industry, the author—a five-foot-nine, 120-pound 27-year-old—went undercover, asking three plastic surgeons what they’d do to her nose, her breasts, and her, uh, “banana rolls.” The answers were as different as the doctors themselves.

Dinner is served—on the author.