She is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, a senior research fellow at Yale Law School, and co-host of the Slate podcast Political Gabfest.

She has written two national bestsellers published by Penguin Random House: Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy (2013) and Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration (2019).

[1][2] Charged won the 2020 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the Current Interest category, and the 2020 Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association.

[22][19] She has written on subjects such as voting rights,[23] the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld Guantanamo detainee due process trial[24] and the alleged post-abortion syndrome.

[28] Between 2012 and 2014, Bazelon made eight appearances on The Colbert Report on Comedy Central to discuss Supreme Court and anti-bullying issues.

"[33] Bazelon's series also sparked heated reaction[34] and a response from district attorney Elizabeth Scheibel,[35] who brought the charges against the six teenagers.

"[38] In The Wall Street Journal, Meghan Cox Gurdon called Sticks and Stones a "humane and closely reported exploration of the way that hurtful power relationships play out in the contemporary public-school setting".

[48] In July 2009, the New York Times Magazine published Bazelon's interview with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

"[49] Bazelon did not ask any follow-up question to what some interpreted as Ginsburg endorsing a eugenics-based rationale for legalized abortion, i.e., as a remedy for "populations that we don't want to have too many of.

In February, 2022, Texas Governor Greg Abbott directed state agencies to investigate and limit gender-affirming healthcare for transgender minors.

[59] In a subsequent lawsuit challenging this directive, the state of Texas hired controversial sexologist James Cantor as an expert witness.

[62] In 2023, the Missouri Attorney General cited the article in an emergency order to implement a de facto ban on trans healthcare for all ages.

[63] Bazelon lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with her husband, Paul Sabin, a professor of history and American studies at Yale.