Names and faces

■ The breakdown in Ticketmaster’s sales of Taylor Swift tickets is a mess some attorneys general aren’t shaking off. With fans sharing anger and heartache over the fruitless hours they spent trying for seats for Swift’s upcoming concert tour, top legal chiefs in Nevada, Tennessee and Pennsylvania have launched investigations into the fiasco. “Trouble, trouble, trouble,” tweeted Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro in a reference to Swift’s 2012 hit song “I Knew You Were Trouble” as he asked the public to file complaints about using Ticketmaster with his office. Shapiro, a Democrat who recently won Pennsylvania’s governor race, has since thanked people for their “swift response” while noting his office had received “a lot of complaints” to look into. In Tennessee, Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti said he wants to ensure consumers have a fair shot at buying tickets. The trouble began when registered fans given codes for a pre-sale on Tuesday tried to secure tickets for Swift’s 52-date The Eras tour next year. They were quickly met with long delays and error messages that Ticketmaster blamed on bots and historically unprecedented demand. The company then canceled Friday’s sales to the general public. Swift vented anger and frustration in a lengthy statement, saying she had been assured by Ticketmaster that they could handle the demand. “It’s really difficult for me to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties, and excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse,” Swift said.

■ A collection of touching and sometimes prescient personal letters written by a young Bob Dylan to a high school girlfriend has been sold at auction to a renowned Portuguese bookshop for nearly $670,000. The Livraria Lello in Porto, Portugal, which bills itself as “the World’s Most Beautiful Bookshop,” plans to keep the archive of 42 handwritten letters totaling 150 pages complete and available for Dylan fans and scholars to study, auctioneer RR Auction said in a statement Friday. Dylan, a native of Hibbing, Minn., wrote the letters to Barbara Ann Hewitt between 1957 and 1959 when he was still known as Bob Zimmerman. They provide an insight into a period of his life of which not much is known. Remarkably, in some of the letters Dylan writes about changing his name and hoping to sell a million records. Decades later, the now 81-year-old Dylan and 2016 recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature has sold about 125 million records. The young musician also expresses his affection for Hewitt, invites her to a Buddy Holly show, includes little fragments of poetry, and talks about the sorts of things that generations of high school students have been concerned about, such as cars, clothes and music.

Dylan

Swift