Jon Hamm is back on TV in a lead role, and all seems right with at least one corner of the world. In this new series, the former Mad Men star plays a hedge fund manager who’s axed for poor performance and begins burglarizing the homes of his ultra-wealthy neighbors to maintain his high-roller lifestyle. All goes well with the new enterprise until he uncovers dark secrets that put him in danger. With Amanda Peet, Olivia Munn, and Hoon Lee. Friday, April 11, Apple TV+.

by David Sheff

“The past decade or so has brought a great reassessment of Yoko Ono,” said Geoff Edgers in The Washington Post. No longer do Beatles fans blame her for the band’s breakup, as they did for decades. Her art has been featured in a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, and her equally avant-garde music cited as an influence by Lady Gaga, St. Vincent, and David Byrne. David Sheff’s new book, the first significant biography of Ono, pushes the re-evaluation further by arguing that Ono’s career was more damaged by the couple’s famous union than John Lennon’s was. After all, her work would have been better appreciated by art critics than mainstream pop culture watchers. Still, “the strength of Sheff’s book is simple journalism,” in his marshaling facts to tell Ono’s life story in full.

Sheff isn’t just any biographer, said Kate Mossman in The New Statesman. He’s been a friend of Ono’s since, at 24, he interviewed Ono and Lennon for Playboy shortly before Lennon was assassinated in 1980. But he doesn’t paint Ono as saintly. The book shows us a damaged woman, “not just withdrawn and cold, but positively screaming with an inner loneliness.” Born in Japan to wealthy but distant parents, she wound up begging for food after surviving World War II bombing raids. When she moved to the U.S. and began gaining fame for performance art such as 1964’s Cut Piece, in which viewers were invited to cut away her clothing, her parents were more ashamed than proud. Two years later, she met Lennon, and Beatles fans soon enough began demonizing her. 

Sheff “covers the dark moments in the couple’s relationship, including their heroin use,” said Barbara Spindel in The Christian Science Monitor. “The author is also frank about Ono’s shortcomings as a parent,” reporting that both her daughter, Kyoko, and son, Sean, describe her as having been less interested in them than her art. Even so, Sheff’s depiction of Ono “feels gentle, empathetic, committed to righting undeniable wrongs,” starting with her influence on the Beatles, said Victoria Segal in The Times (U.K.). Without Ono, Sheff argues, Lennon may well have left the band before the recording of Abbey Road and Let It Be. The couple’s 14-year relationship comes across here as “a profound love story, a febrile artistic partnership, a codependent nightmare, and a meeting of two traumatized minds.” And while the decades after Lennon’s murder appear to have been even more trying, Ono, now 92, didn’t merely hide, and Sheff honors that. “Yoko: A Biography is by no means as radical as its formidable subject, but it successfully documents Ono’s remarkable creative resolve and resilience.”

The author who started the teen vampire craze

L.J. Smith gave the world a taste for teenage vampires. The author of the Vampire Diaries series, which has sold more than 5 million copies, began writing the tale of a girl caught in a love triangle between two blood-feeding brothers in 1990. Inexperienced in negotiating, she signed away rights to her work for just a few thousand dollars—not knowing that the cultural passion for high school vampires would reignite years later. When her publisher started churning out ghostwritten Vampire Diaries books, Smith went around traditional book channels to keep control of the narrative. “I wanted to finish the story,” she said in 2014. “So many people still wrote to me constantly, saying, ‘Can you just tell me how it ends?’” 

Raised in Southern California by an engineer and a teacher, Lisa Jane Smith started writing her first novel, The Night of the Solstice, in high school, but spent several years as a teacher before committing herself full-time to fiction. She “chose to model her pen name after her two favorite fantasy writers,” J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, said People. The Night of the Solstice sold only 5,000 copies, but it caught the attention of the publishing imprint Alloy Entertainment and led to the first three Vampire Diaries books. The following decade, the Twilight series “ushered in a vogue for sexy stories of vampires more toothsome than toothy,” said The Telegraph (U.K.). Smith published another Vampire Diaries trilogy from 2009 to 2011, and it turned into a cultural sensation when the CW Network picked up a TV adaptation. But Alloy dropped Smith when she refused to “recycle storylines from the TV show”—and it kept publishing Vampire Diaries novels. Incensed, she took to Amazon’s now-defunct Kindle Worlds to publish her own novel and novella in the series. “Readers warred with each other online as to which should be regarded as canonical,” and Smith won out. 

“An indefatigable writer,” said The New York Times, Smith kept working “as she went in and out of hospitals” after being diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder. Before she died, she had reportedly completed Night World, another YA series, as well as a new postapocalyptic novel aimed at adults. Many of her teenage fans from the 1990s, she noted, had helped hook a new generation on Vampire Diaries. “It’s nice to hear people say, ‘Now I can share it with my daughter.’”