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. Scott Rudin

An article about how the now disgraced Hollywood producer influenced a 1994 film about Hollywood cruelty.

(Vanity Fair, approx mins reading time)

Huang was a young production assistant himself when he began writing the script, based on the atrocious things he and his fellow underlings experienced. “Look, anybody who’s an assistant in Hollywood, the only way we survived was to get together and trade war stories, and you try to outdo each other,” Huang said. “Consistently, my friends who worked for Scott Rudin would always win. Some of the stories they told were almost too absurd to be true. If I put it in the movie, no one would’ve believed it.”

2. Build-to-rent

Are these types of homes crowding out other kinds of homes in Dublin? 

(Dublin Inquirer, approx 8 mins reading time)

3. World’s greatest jailbreak artist

Rédoine Faïd was a cinema buff – so when he ended up behind bars, his favourite films provided some inspiration…  

(GQ, approx 15 mins reading time)

These are the solitary confinement quarters: a controlled unit within the maximum-security prison where notable or potentially dangerous criminals are held. Few prisoners in France are as notable as the 46-year-old Faïd, who officially ranks among the country’s highest-risk inmates. A notorious thief—the architect of a flurry of dazzling heists and blockbuster robberies in the 1990s that targeted banks, jewelry stores, and armored cars—Faïd became more infamous still in 2013, when he blasted out of the Sequedin prison, near Lille, where he’d been serving time after a botched robbery, using smuggled explosives. That dramatic escape embarrassed the top echelons of the French justice system, and since Faïd’s recapture six weeks later, he’s been under stringent restrictions.

4. India’s Covid catastrophe 

The author Arundhati Roy on what’s happening in India. 

(The Guardian, approx 22 mins reading time)

This one was predicted, although its virulence has taken even scientists and virologists by surprise. So where is the Covid-specific infrastructure and the “people’s movement” against the virus that Modi boasted about in his speech? Hospital beds are unavailable. Doctors and medical staff are at breaking point. Friends call with stories about wards with no staff and more dead patients than live ones. People are dying in hospital corridors, on roads and in their homes. Crematoriums in Delhi have run out of firewood. The forest department has had to give special permission for the felling of city trees. 

5. Girl, Wash Your Face

A look at hw a writer famous for building a company built around her authentic self found herself in a storm of criticism.

(New York Times, approx mins reading time)

The gulf between Rachel Hollis, online persona, and Rachel Hollis, boss, grew increasingly wide, employees said. The bubbly woman who appeared weekday mornings on “Start Today” was not the one who arrived at the HoCo office just hours later. “She would go from being silly and talking about peeing in her pants to walking into the office in sunglasses, not saying hello to anyone,” said Ms. Crooks, who has written a novel, “My Life With the Mogul,” about a young woman whose idealism is crushed by the experience of working for a personal-development celebrity.

6. Endometriosis 

Professor Linda G Griffith wants to make sure endometriosis is no longer seen as a ‘women’s issue’.

(New York Times, approx 15 mins reading time)

Dr. Griffith founded the lab in 2009 with the goal of helping researchers solve endometriosis, a chronic disorder in which tissue similar to that which normally lines the uterus instead grows outside it. The disease strikes one in 10 women, as well as trans men and nonbinary people who menstruate. Its hallmarks are extreme pain and, in some cases, infertility. Yet it suffers from a branding problem: It falls into the abyss of “women’s diseases” (overlooked), diseases that don’t kill you (unimportant) and menstrual problems (taboo). Researchers often call endometriosis “benign,” as in noncancerous — but doing so, Dr. Griffith believes, lessens the seriousness of a common, painful disease.

…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…

This 2016 article is about how Sunnis were affected after Isis in Iraq.

(The Atlantic, approx 41 mins reading time)

By March, when isis was battling Iraqi forces in Tikrit, 120 miles north, Falah could feel the city changing. In the market, neighbors began to look away from him. At police checkpoints, the family’s IDs were examined more closely. Sometimes, beige pickup trucks with burly Shiite militiamen in the back circled the block. Black banners proclaiming oh hussein!—the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, revered by Shias—began appearing on the storefronts of Sunni-owned businesses. Falah wondered whether the flags were taunts, or had been placed there for protection by the shopkeepers themselves.

More: The best reads from every previous Sitdown Sunday>