From furniture made of trash to metrosexual knights, here’s the best of OZY this week.

In the last week, global headlines have kept us on our toes (for better and worse) — nearly 1,000 Google employees signed a letter to protest the building of a censored search engine; fans everywhere paid their respects to Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul; and President Donald Trump’s military parade planned for Veterans Day has been called off — what a buzzkill, right? But have no fear, for the weekend has arrived — now you can kick your feet back and browse the stories in this week’s best of OZY collection.

Forced labor in the U.S. is far more common than you think, bolstered by tighter immigration laws.

A health care worker was on a routine visit to the home of an Iraqi couple in suburban El Cajon in Orange County, California, in early 2016 when the housekeeper surreptitiously slipped her a note. The health care worker gave the note to authorities who translated it from Indonesian to discover that the housekeeper claimed she was being held against her will.

Agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations descended on the residence, arrested those responsible and rescued the housekeeper. But thousands of others remain trapped. According to the Walk Free Foundation's 2018 Global Slavery Index, 400,000 people in the U.S. — that's nearly 1 in 800 — are enslaved.

Whale-inspired furnishings made from plastic bottles are making a splash in Amsterdam.

Forward-looking Dutch firms are bringing something of a sea change to corporate furnishings by equipping boardrooms with whale-inspired furniture — chairs and tables made out of plastic plucked from the sea by tourists.

This year, 14 Netherlands-based companies were the first to purchase Plastic Whale’s first collection of Circular Furniture. The collection — a joint effort between Plastic Whale, LAMA Concept and Vepa Project Furniture — features surfaces made from wood and mostly waste material. And that waste is pretty special: Each of the 1,000-plus plastic bottles it takes to make a table, the 60–80 for the chairs and the 20 for the lamps has been fished out of Amsterdam’s canals by hundreds of thousands of volunteers.