At first glance, the 53 letters mailed in October 2008 from Amarillo, Texas, to Chase banks around the country looked like the multitude of letters that companies and government agencies receive from regular people every day: addressed to the institution at large and not anybody in particular, an implicit sign of the power differential between hapless sender and indifferent receiver. The content of the Amarillo letters, however, was intended to invert this relationship, at least temporarily. The first of them was opened by an employee at a Chase bank in Norman, Okla., a little after 11 a.m. on Monday, Oct. 20. A white powder, soft as talcum, spilled out of the envelope, landing on the employee’s desk. Inside was a typewritten note that read, in part, “It’s payback time. What you breathed in will kill you within 10 days.”
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A few years ago, the singer and songwriter Lizzy Grant reinvented herself online. This seems overwhelmingly unremarkable behavior in the 21st century, particularly for a would-be pop musician, but it proved scandalous. Grant, a 25-year-old singer-songwriter from upstate New York, recorded an EP and an album in the late 2000s. Some time before the summer of 2011, according to a recent Billboardstory, she deleted her social-networking profiles and a site bearing her name, and withdrew her album, Lizzy Grant aka Lana Del Rey, from iTunes. Last August, she uploaded a music video to YouTube under the stage name Lana Del Rey—goodbye Grant. The clip was for “Video Games,” a beguilingly morose love song. Helped along by music blogs and BBC Radio 1, which supported the track early, the video became a hit: Today, it’s been viewed more than 22 million times.
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