The sun was out all weekend! And, a pair of ducks who have been living four blocks away from me decided to move into a group of bushes across the street. Having them as neighbors made Pip’s head explode.

Pip and the ducks.

As we walked the neighborhood Sunday morning, I listened to the Social Justice Portal’s podcast, Through the Portal. In this month’s episode, they interviewed my law school professor, Dean Spade, who I have fan-girled over since I attended “Feminist Summer Camp” in 2010.

That summer, I spent a week in New York City visiting various feminist organizations, including the National Advocates for Pregnant Women and Dean Spade’s Sylvia Rivera Law Project, to learn about their movement work. I’ve followed Dean Spade’s work since then and even wrote about him in my admissions essay to Seattle University School of Law.

Dean is massively talented at explaining complex systems of inequality and methods of resistance in normal human-speak, instead of lawyer-speak, academic-speak, or even activist-speak. In one hour, the podcast covers abolitionism, whether practicing law can really dismantle systems of inequality, climate change, and mutual aid. I always learn something new and am challenged to think of what I think I know in new ways when I listen to Dean speak.

I also read Jacobin’s coverage on what Branko Marcetic describes as Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) establishment of a “domestic spying agency that could easily be turned on the American people, whether citizens, documented, or undocumented:”

According to the report, ICE has used facial-recognition technology to scan the driver’s license photos of roughly a third of US adults, can access the driver’s license data of three-quarters of adults, and can track the movements of cars in cities that make up 70 percent of the adult population. In at least five of the seventeen jurisdictions where undocumented people can apply for licenses, ICE can search state driver records without a warrant.

I often take issues of surveillance for granted, so I appreciated this summary of the much longer report by the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology on which it is based.

Finally, I read a lot of different pieces about the baby formula shortage, including this graphic article from Vox, outlining the “many, many costs of breastfeeding,” and New York Magazine’s piece on whether the U.S. should nationalize baby formula production.