Janet Mock.

The event extended all the way up a spiral staircase to the bridal and couture displays on the third floor, which had wooden desks and luxurious armchairs in the center of the room because, as a fellow Observer remarked, you need to sit down before they can tell you the prices.

After mistaking a bejeweled seashell for one of Yurman’s newest belts in the men’s collection (“it’s part of the display,” explained the sales attendant), we ran into Janet Mock, People staff writer, transgender activist and GLAAD Awards co-chair.

“To amplify our voice as an LGBT community, and bring us all together, it’s an amazing experience,” she said of the GLAAD Awards.

We asked her about her entrance to the event, because a publicist took a while to find her name on the list.

“Oh, I didn’t notice!” She laughed. “I don’t expect people to know who I am, I’m not a celebrity. I’m just a journalist trying to tell my story.”

Popstar Ari Gold was in attendance as well, but only briefly, and we were temporarily blinded by a large purple diamond pendant in the couture section, so we missed him. Perhaps the hors d'oeuvres didn't sit quite right.

To the Editor:

The answer to the question in the front-page headline of Sara Vilkomerson’s cover story, “Who Is Driving Ari Gold Crazy?”, is this: Entourage’s Ari Gold is driving the real-life Ari Gold crazy [“Ari vs. Mata Hari,” April 2]. Despite being told by record executives that I should change my name because it sounded “too Jewish,” I have been determined to keep it and prove that Jews can be sexy pop stars in front of the camera—not just sleazy behind-the-scenes agents. And yet here I am, battling this stereotype in a way I never anticipated. If you ask gay people around the world, “Who is Ari Gold?”, they will tell you that I am the first pop/R&B singer to be openly gay from the beginning of my career, writing songs with explicit gay subject matter. Having grown up a gay, orthodox Jew in the Bronx, I have been unapologetic in my work about both my sexuality and my Jewish identity, challenging homophobic and anti-Semitic perceptions of what it means to be gay and Jewish. Perhaps when my third album comes out this summer, I’ll get to be “shtetl fabulous” on the cover of The New York Observer instead of my HBO doppelgänger: because what’s in a name, anyway?

Ari Gold

Manhattan

Take the High Road

To the Editor:

Thank you for John Koblin’s preview and report on the “goings-on” at the upcoming High Line Park [“High Line Park Spurs Remaking of Formerly Grotty Chelsea,” April 2]. I am a late-40’s lifetime New Yorker, who moved into Manhattan in early 1980 (you do the math) and “walked” to Studio 54 the first night I moved in (55th & First). I have been crisscrossing Manhattan, the boroughs and the suburbs since then. I have been very successful at sales over the years, so I am not a member of the angry “have-not” club. My point is that the overdevelopment of this city is astonishing. I truly believe that the “very high-end,” “upscale clientele” that are scooping up these luxury condos like heavily discounted wedding dresses will one day abandon this city and its rows of luxury housing.

It’s all fun in the beginning, but when the city is full of luxury housing and little else, where will they dine out, shop for enticing doodads and generally amuse themselves? In my neighborhood (Sutton Place) alone, we have lost all of the restaurants on First Avenue to developers of these stackable palaces of the rich and their excesses. Each new building serves to remove a chunk of the neighborhood for those that do not live there. It’s like walking a full city block without any access to what you are walking by. Kind of like “forced window-shopping.”

The best part of N.Y.C. has always been that we do juxtaposition better than anyone else in the world! This all strikes me as shortsightedness of a magnitude never before seen. Everyone thinks that the building of all of these buildings will keep N.Y.C. fully populated, but at what cost?

Lloyd N. Greenspan

Manhattan

Public Humiliation

To the Editor:

Thanks go out to Mr. John Heilpern for speaking truth to the theater, a place where truth is rarely revealed these days. Unfortunately, the plea that Mr. Heilpern made [“Eustis, Lapine, Kline Bonk Heads Against Great Lear,” At the Theater, March 19] for the new artistic director of the Public Theater, Oskar Eustis, to open his ears will most definitely be ignored.

When Mr. Eustis took the helm at the Public, he was quoted in The Village Voice as saying that he was seeking “talented artists with skill and complexity,” artists who have “grown up and developed in a downtown theater scene, experimenting with form, questioning the primacy of narrative, and breaking apart expectations.” Again, Mr. Eustis leans toward hyperbole and platitudes.

I am a downtown New York theater director who, like many others, Mr. Eustis refuses to acknowledge. I have patiently waited for over a year and a half to introduce myself, but he apparently won’t answer unsolicited letters. In other words, the Public is not open to the Public. Mr. Eustis’ Public Theater seems interested in playing it safe, producing comfortable theater by comfortable theater professionals.

Unfortunately, one by one, Shakespeare’s great plays are dying under his dull sword.

Is it any wonder that the majority of tickets for the “Free” Shakespeare-in-the-Park are reserved for the Public’s corporate sponsors? We know who Mr. Eustis’ audience really is, and it’s not the public.

Thanks for keeping it real, Mr. Heilpern.

Eric Wallach

Manhattan

The novel—no surprise—grew out of the blog (www.anonymouslawyer.blogspot.com), which Mr. Blachman started while he was still a student at Harvard Law School. Anonymous and fictional (it was written from the perspective of a hiring partner at a top law firm), his blog nonetheless became a must-read among disgruntled law-firm associates around the country, who identified with its unsparing portrait of the white-collar salt mines that are America’s largest law firms (a.k.a. “Biglaw”). After Mr. Blachman publicly revealed himself as the blog’s author in a New York Times interview, he landed a book deal; Anonymous Lawyer is the result. A television pilot is also in the works. (These successes have allowed Mr. Blachman—whose only direct exposure to Biglaw life was a stint as a summer associate at the New York firm of Willkie, Farr & Gallagher—to escape the fate he so ably chronicles.)

So yes, Anonymous Lawyer is yet another blog-turned-book. But unlike many other blog-based novels, in which anonymous blogging is merely a plot element (Ana Marie Cox’s Dog Days, say, or Jessica Cutler’s Washingtonienne), blogging here provides both form and content. The narrative unfolds in eight weeks’ worth of posts penned by the protagonist, along with related e-mail exchanges—most notably between Anonymous Lawyer and Anonymous Niece, an incoming Yale Law School student who serves as Anonymous’ confidante during his foray into the blogosphere. The prose is not finely wrought, in the manner of Kermit Roosevelt’s recent legal novel In the Shadow of the Law; instead, Anonymous Lawyer partakes of the breezy, casual style of cyber-communication.

The novel, luckily, has more of a plot than the blog, with the chairmanship of the law firm serving as the MacGuffin: Anonymous is after the top job, and to get it he must outmaneuver his archrival, “The Jerk.” Inevitably, predictably, the secret blog that Anonymous has been maintaining complicates matters.

The obvious objection to all this is that a Biglaw hiring partner would never maintain a blog in which he mercilessly mocks his colleagues (with monikers such as “The Guy With the Giant Mole,” “Lives With His Mom” and “Closet Lesbian”), dishes out office gossip and discusses his strategic jockeying for the chairmanship (which a true Machiavellian would never do). When Mr. Blachman explains how his protagonist got into blogging in the first place, the motivations offered are not entirely convincing. If Anonymous had wanted a literary outlet, “a place to write about life,” he could have just written novels on the side (à la Scott Turow or Louis Begley). If he’d wanted to vent about work or to achieve greater self-awareness, therapy would have been more effective—and less risky.

But enough quibbling. After you buckle the seatbelt of suspended disbelief, you can sit back and enjoy the ride. Anonymous Lawyer is a quick, fun read—you could finish it in a single afternoon at the beach—and it offers occasional moments of genuine humor. Consider this riff on the film clips that Anonymous screens for incoming summer associates: “I showed a clip from Brokeback Mountain, which I think was done a tremendous disservice when they pitched it as a gay cowboy movie …. [I]t was fairly clear from the trailer that the point of the movie is that it’s great to have a job that consumes most of your day …. I [also] showed a clip from March of the Penguins for an example of mindless work performed without complaint. The penguins march back and forth to and from the ocean, a long and arduous march in the cold on which many perish, yet none ever bitch and moan. They just do it.”

Although generally enjoyable, Mr. Blachman’s satire is not unerring; some of it could have been more finely calibrated. Or, anyway, less broad: Refugees from large-firm practice will read about an associate missing her own child’s funeral and think that firm life was bad, but never that bad.

The book is briskly plotted. The blog and e-mail format, surprisingly, offers the satisfactions of good old-fashioned storytelling: Events reach a climactic state fairly early, about halfway through the novel, and the balance of the story is a fast-paced unraveling of the different threads. The suspense keeps you turning pages even after the novel’s other main draw—the narrator’s wicked wit—begins to overstay its welcome.

David Lat founded the judicial-gossip blog Underneath Their Robes (underneaththeirrobes.blogs.com) and will launch a new legal blog, Above the Law (www.abovethelaw.com), later this summer. He has worked as a federal prosecutor, law-firm associate and federal law clerk.