IT’S A DAY of rest, and you may be in the mood for a quiet corner and a comfy chair.

We’ve hand-picked the week’s best reads for you to savour.

1. The truth behind the influencer economy

Symeon Brown explores the so-called hustle economy and the promise of easy success through being an influencer is not as cut and dry as it seems, with deception being a lucrative business for some.

The Guardian (Approx 14 minutes reading time)

The problem is that success in this world is not as attainable as some make it seem, and addiction to accruing followers by any means necessary is warping human behaviour on and offline. For many influencers, deception is lucrative, and becoming increasingly extreme. There are some feigning their wealth, their followers and even their ethnicity while hawking dubious products to their followers.

2. The Alison Parker murder NFT

The father of Alison Parker, an American journalist who was shot dead alongside a cameraman during a live interview, has created an NFT of the footage as part of efforts to have the footage removed from the internet

The Washington Post (Reading time approximately 7 minutes)

While Facebook and YouTube say they have taken down thousands of clips of the murders, dozens have remained on the platforms. Through the years, Parker has deployed a range of strategies for erasing the stragglers, enlisting a fleet of allies to search and flag the videos and filing complaints with federal regulators. Last month, he launched a congressional campaign focused partly on holding social media companies accountable for the spread of harmful content on their sites.

3. A family secret unearthed by a lost kimono

Following the discovery of silk kimonos in his grandfathers’ shed after he passed away, Shane Konno had the details of their grandmother’s life in a Japanese internment camp opened up, as Japanese-American youths grapple with the history of US interment.

Some of the Issei, first generation Japanese immigrants, and Nisei kept their experience in the camps a secret as they didn’t want to pass on painful memories to the next generations. The Japanese term shikata ga nai translates to “it can’t be undone”. Konno’s dad and his siblings are Sansei, or third generation. “For Dad’s generation, it’s not hard for them to not ask too many questions. The trauma happened to their parents. To them, this isn’t a piece of history that you can read,” they say. That’s why Konno says it’s up to them, the Yonsei or fourth generation, to keep this legacy alive.

BBC (Reading time approximately 7 minutes)

4. Supervised drugs – From radical to reality

Details of safe injection sites in the US are explained and show how they have saved the lives of drug users in New York City and beyond.

“Code Blue,” a radio crackles. Two floors below me, someone has just overdosed.

It is the 80th overdose in just five weeks between two sites operated by the nonprofit group OnPoint NYC; this one is in East Harlem, the other in Washington Heights. “We are like an ER here,” says Rivera, the group’s executive director. “Just wait here. Don’t leave the room,” he says and hurries out the door to investigate.

Less than 30 minutes later, he’s back, sweat glistening on his forehead. He tells me that a young woman who had injected fentanyl started to have trouble breathing and began to lose consciousness. The staff gave her oxygen and, sensing that wasn’t enough, opted for a small shot of the overdose-reversal drug naloxone, which almost instantly revived her. Within ten minutes, she was on her way out the door.

NY Mag (Reading time approximately 11 minutes)

5. The false teeth that fooled the world 

Paul Bishop was a 63-year-old civil servant from Manchester when his life was thrown into the spotlight after dentures that he had not seen in over a decade were returned to him in the post.

 Here’s what happened—according to Bishop. Eleven years ago he was on a holiday in Spain celebrating a friend’s 50th birthday. One night, after a full day of drinking, he attempted to down what was left of his pint of cider. It did not go to plan. “I washed it down in one but could feel it coming back up,” Bishop told the Manchester Evening News. Bishop vomited the contents of his stomach—and his top set of dentures—into a bin. That was the last time Bishop saw his teeth, until he received the mysterious package.

Wired (Reading time approximately 9 minutes)

6. Ben Stiller and his changing perspective

After several turbulent years, with the deaths of his parents, the total flop that was Zoolander 2 and a global pandemic, Ben Stiller says his life is getting back on track and that his dreams are in motion as he releases his new Apple + TV show, Severance.

About those dreams of his: They’ve evolved. In 2014, he was treated for an aggressive form of prostate cancer. In 2015, his mother, Anne Meara, died at age eighty-five, after having a serious stroke. The following year, Zoolander No. 2 flopped spectacularly—and while the failure of a zany comedy isn’t a tragedy, especially compared to losing one’s mother, when it’s an international spectacle that you conceived, wrote, directed, starred in, and produced, and it seems like the whole world is watching it fail, it is, Stiller says, “not a great experience.” In 2017 his seventeen-year marriage to Christine Taylor unraveled, and they separated—and because they’re famous, it felt like the whole world was watching that, too. His father, Jerry Stiller, died in May 2020 at age ninety-two.

Esquire (Reading time approximately 18 minutes)

… AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…

This article, from Longreads, helps capture the hype that was felt around the world with the release of Netflix’s hit programme, Tiger King. With details of America’s strange and dangerous big cat people, it’s a trip into a bizarre world of business dealings involving tigers and lions.

It’s a gloomy April afternoon in rural Oklahoma, and I’m sitting on the floor of a fluorescent-lit room at a roadside zoo with Nova, a 12-week-old tiliger. She looks like a tiger cub, but she’s actually a crossbreed, an unnatural combination of a tiger father and a mother born of a tiger and a lion. That unique genetic makeup places a higher price tag on cubs like Nova, and makes it easier, legally speaking, to abuse and exploit them. Endangered species protections don’t apply to artificial breeds such as tiligers. Hybridization, however, has done nothing to quell Nova’s predatory instincts. For the umpteenth time during the past six minutes, she lunges at my face, claws splayed and mouth ajar — only to be halted mid-leap as her handler jerks her harness. Unphased, Nova gets right back to pouncing.

Longreads (Reading time approximately 28 minutes)

More: The best reads from every previous Sitdown Sunday