The Best of the Week’s News

• Big business gets a lump of coal from the Obama administration. 
   
• Who will stop Republican Islamophobia?
   
• The invisible street kids of Philly. 
   
• Barbara Ehrenreich on what’s killing the white working class.

The Best of the Week’s News

• Michael B. Jordan will play Bryan Stevenson in the film adaptation of Stevenson’s legal memoir “Just Mercy.”   
   
• ‘One Person, One Vote” under attack. 
   
• A closer look at the US attack on the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz. 
   
• Before juice cleanses, before gulten-free-everything, there was the cult of the coconut. 
   

The Best of the Week’s News

• Donald Trump and xenophobia. 
   
• What a researcher learned from interviewing captured ISIS fighters.
   
• When temp workers die in transit, who’s responsible?
   
• Illegally mined Colombian gold sold in the United States. 
   
• How Black Lives Matter became a force on campus. 

Jessica Silver-Greenberg, Michael Corkery and Robert Gebeloff of the New York Times win the November Sidney for “Beware the Fine Print,” a sweeping exposé of the private arbitration system.

In the last few years, it has become difficult to rent a car, sign up for cellphone service, or accept a job without signing away your right to your day in court. In the wake of two far-reaching Supreme Court decisions in 2011 and 2013, corporations can force consumers to waive their right to sue as a condition of doing business. Companies can also make consumers renounce their right to join a class action lawsuit. Class actions have historically been a critical means for ordinary people to challenge systematic wrongdoing by corporations, from fradulent billing practices to wage theft and discrimination. 

Learn more about the Times’ remarkable piece of journalism in our Backstory interview with Robert Gebeloff.