It’s not uncommon to wish your ex was dead, but what if all of them began meeting early demises? Stephanie Hsu (Everything Everywhere All at Once) stars in this dark comedy as Ruby, a self-involved 33-year-old who discovers that her former boyfriends and hookups are dying off. Enlisting the help of her true crime-obsessed friend, played by Zosia Mamet, Ruby sets out to solve the mystery while revisiting her relationship history. Thursday, Dec. 19, Peacock.

Rock critic Rob Sheffield didn’t write a book on Taylor Swift just to cash in, said Carla Jean Whitley in BookPage. The 58-year-old Rolling Stone writer has been a Swiftie as long as anybody, blown away by her songwriting since her 2006 debut album. He keeps a running ranking on Rolling Stone’s website of every song in her hundreds-strong catalog, and he’s always been quick to argue with people who dismiss Swift because so many of her fans are teenage girls. “The teenage girls are the most sophisticated listeners,” he says. “No one listens to music more closely and are tougher to con.” His Swift book, Heartbreak Is the National Anthem, can’t compete commercially with Swift’s own self-published Eras Tour coffee-table volume, which just sold more copies in its first week than any other book this year. But Sheffield’s work is itself a modest best-seller, and it achieves its aim: It inspires readers to focus on Swift’s artistry. 

Not everyone is going to agree with Sheffield about every song, said Chris Willman in Variety. He adores the semi-deep cuts “Ours” and “New Romantics.” He abhors the single “Bad Blood”—and has fun explaining why. But he fully believes that Swift is on a level with the Beatles and David Bowie in her greatness, and in the way she’s changed pop music. When she arrived, she was a novelty in being a girl who was writing about being a girl. But today, he says, thanks to her, “pop music by women for women is pop music. That’s an astoundingly huge innovation.” If some readers disagree, he welcomes the debate, saying Swift would do the same. “Whatever else kind of role Taylor Swift has in pop history,” he says, “she’s the all-time most fun artist to argue about.”

The best-selling minister who forecast end times

Hal Lindsey earned wealth and fame by predicting global apocalypse. The former tugboat captain was an obscure evangelical preacher when his book The Late Great Planet Earth was issued by a small religious publisher in 1970. The book forecast that a Russian invasion of Israel would spark a cascading global conflict in which hundreds of millions would die and the world’s great cities would be reduced to smoking ruins, paving the way for Jesus Christ to “re- turn and save man from self-extinction.” Incorporating Scripture and references to contemporary politics and culture, it proved phenomenally successful, selling 35 million copies in some 50 languages, and was adapted for a 1978 documentary narrated by Orson Welles. The book’s triumph came as no surprise to Lindsey. “God called me and gifted me to speak on prophecy,” he said in 1997. “He had plans for it beyond anything I could dream.” 

A Houston native, Lindsey attended the University of Houston but left to join the Coast Guard during the Korean War, then settled in New Orleans as a tugboat skipper. But in his mid-20s, he “began to read the Bible intently,” said The New York Times, and he shifted gears to study at Dallas Theological Seminary. Moving to Southern California, he joined a ministry that evangelized on college campuses and began writing his opus with co-author Carole C. Carlson. The book tapped into “Cold War-era fears” of global annihilation, said The Washington Post. After Bantam Books bought the mass paperback rights, it “became a fixture on best-seller lists” and The New York Times deemed it the most popular nonfiction book of the 1970s. 

Lindsey, who wrote numerous follow-up books, “accrued a fortune” through speaking engagements and sales of books and “multimedia products,” said Christianity Today. Publisher’s Weekly called him an “evangelist who sports a Porsche racing jacket and tools around Los Angeles in a Mercedes 450 SI.” In later years he hosted a weekly program on the Trinity Broadcasting Network and a call-in show carried on more than 70 Christian radio stations. His four marriages “raised questions about his character for many evangelicals,” but “the biggest blow to his reputation was his failed predictions” of Armageddon. “There’s just a split second’s difference between a hero and a bum,” he said in 1977. “I didn’t ask to be a hero, but I guess I have become one. If I’m wrong about this, I guess I’ll become a bum.”