The Dispatch Monthly Mailbag with Harvest Prude

Dear Dispatch Members, 

Thank you all for your thoughtful questions for Harvest in our first ever Monthly Mailbag. We heard from so many of you it was impossible to answer all of the questions. But Harvest did her best to answer what she could while still writing and reporting for The Dispatch. Read her answers below, and stay tuned to see who will be on the docket for next month. 

Paul Joseph: Your top 10 fave sci-fi/fantasy books? And also how you were given such a cool name? 

I’m going to cheat and put my 10 favorite books in general, in no particular order: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Diana Wynne Jones’ Howl’s Moving Castle, Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow, Richard Adams’ Watership Down, J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (further cheating by counting this as one), Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and more recently, Naomi Novik’s Uprooted.

As for my name, from what I have pieced together after the fact, my parents went to church with a family who had named their daughter Harvest and liked the sound and the principle of gathering what one has sown. The aforementioned family ended up moving away before I was born so they went for it.

Wilhelm: Hey, Harvest. During the January 6 attacks, how successful were you at maintaining a reporter’s mindset while faced with the possibility of personal harm? Did you finally stop reporting and hunker down? If so, who was with you? Thanks!

Hi Wilhelm, I remember having dueling impulses. One was just a sort of human shock at what was happening, which made me slow to respond to the initial directions to evacuate. I believe I was the last reporter from my section to evacuate—I remember letting several others pass me. I don’t know how much of that was a sort of chivalry versus just a disbelief at what was unfolding at the U.S. Capitol. The other impulse was to document what was happening.

An example of how this went internally: Before we evacuated the House chamber, Capitol Hill police officers yelled at everyone to get down. I crouched down behind the chairs/desks along with the rest of the press corps. Where I was, I couldn’t see what was happening. I heard gunshots. My mind started racing—I was wondering if we were in an active shooter situation. Then, I remember another thought taking over; I’m not going to be able to face my editor if I don’t lift my head and see what’s happening. I have to see for myself so I can tell our readers because I am the eyewitness in this situation. Those thoughts were what gave me the push to lift my head and look down into the chamber, where protesters were banging on the doors and Capitol Hill police and some lawmakers were struggling to barricade the door.

Shortly after this, Capitol Hill police rushed to evacuate the remaining lawmakers and we were evacuated shortly after. Then, I hunkered down in a room for hours. I was the only reporter from my outlet at the time there, though the room was packed in general with lawmakers, staffers, and other journalists. During that time, I remember calling my dad to let my family know I was safe and fielding texts from friends as well. But I was basically in reporter mode. I remember things like checking the time and keeping up with what was unfolding online. I recorded an interview for our podcast and wrote an article on what had just happened, and eventually wrote a longer piece as well. I believe I was in the room for something like six hours. Eventually, I was able to go home.

R.A. Watman (Anne): I’d like to know if you see any of the people in Congress reaching across the aisle, working together, and having some success. Also, who are the people we are missing? In other words, who is doing his/her job, and not getting all the headlines?

Good question, R.A. There are a couple of committees to keep an eye on that try to emphasize working across the aisle. One is the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress. They are trying to make Congress run more efficiently by addressing everything from staff payscale to freeing up the congressional calendar so members aren’t on the road as much. I did a Q&A with Reps. Derek Kilmer, Democrat from Washington, and William Timmons, Republican from South Carolina, about their work on the committee here.

Members from swing districts are often ones to keep an eye on. They have more of an incentive to work with the other side. One lawmaker that comes to mind is Rep. Don Bacon—who represents a ticket-splitting district and is a member of the Problem Solvers Caucus. My colleague Ryan Brown interviewed him last summer—you can find that Q&A here. The Problems Solvers Caucus is another place to keep an eye on.

Of course, oftentimes members are most incentivized to reach across the aisle when they are on their way out—retiring Sen. Rob Portman—who has had his fingerprints on the infrastructure deal and other bipartisan legislation—comes to mind. Keeping an eye on retiring members is usually interesting. 

If you’re on the hunt for good news from the Hill in general, it’s true that the good news stories have a tendency to fly under the radar. I remember learning about the term “Secret Congress,” which refers to the idea of legislation passing more easily when it flies under the radar. Simon Bazelon and Matthew Yglesias’ article about the topic—as well as this one in The Atlantic—is worth perusing.

Last year I covered the effort, primarily led by Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and Republican Sen. Joni Ernst, to overhaul the way the military addresses sexual assault cases, a version of which passed in The National Defense Authorization Act last year without too much fanfare.

Ryan White: About a decade ago in graduate school, I did a term abroad in Israel and the Palestinian territories. It was a formative experience for me. For you personally, are there any particular memories, insights, or experiences that will stick with you from your stint in the Middle East? Any way the experience changed you?

Hello, I will say that I am jealous of your whole semester abroad, Ryan. I think my biggest takeaway was a sense of the complexity of life in Israel and the Middle East more broadly. There is a tendency for those of us who are at a distance to try and do a quick sort, often driven by initial impressions or a black and white, oversimplification of events. Visiting the Western Wall, refugee camps in Hebron, and other spots really give you a sense of the layers upon layers of cultures, various deeply rooted religions, and decades of political, national, and ethnic strife. The other thing I noticed when talking with folks in Israel and Palestine was a deep attachment that people there feel to the land. Coming from a relatively young, mobile, and pluralistic Western society like the United States, that sort of intense attachment is not necessarily intuitive. It’s also just a humbling experience to become more aware of my own limited exposure to and knowledge of that region of the world. And of course, the entire experience whetted my appetite to see and learn more. 

Collin: America’s immigration system seems broken. Yet, no party seems interested in fixing it. Just enforcing the law doesn’t seem tenable, when that law is overly complex and confusing. My question has two parts. Is our immigration system as broken as it seems? Why is there no political will for a realistic and practical fix?

Hi Collin, I will try to resist a deep dive into how our current immigration system became such a quagmire out of consideration for word count—and awareness of my own limited knowledge!

Is the system as broken as it seems? Based on my reporting, the system is highly dysfunctional. Examples spring easily to mind: the massive backlogs in the legal immigration system, the overwhelm at the U.S.-Mexico border, the shortage of immigration judges to adjudicate cases, that there is essentially a shadow class of workers in the United States who are mainstays of the agricultural and other business sectors, the way cartels exploit migrants seeking to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. And the list goes on.

Based on past research for stories and talks with folks much smarter than me who work on these issues, a big factor contributing to this brokenness is that America is trying to address 21st-century problems of mass migration and a worldwide refugee crisis with outdated laws (the bulk of the laws currently controlling immigration were passed in the 1980s and before. There has been piecemeal legislation to address border security/enforcement/terrorism concerns and refugee admissions specifically since then but not to retool the rest).

Why immigration is such a source of major political division is another essay, but the very fact that it has become political football is, in my view, the primary driver preventing Democrats and Republicans from joining hands to pass that longed-for realistic and practical fix.

As far as a fix—I think that while there has been political will at times, it has not reached critical mass in recent years. Various, even good faith, attempts at addressing immigration have fallen apart. Even when presidents campaign on it, it’s one of the first things to drop on the list of priorities as presidents take office and become focused on other pressing domestic and international issues (George W. Bush’s administration is one example of this), while lawmakers fall prey to polarization or ambitions for higher office, giving them little incentive to take a vote that may be highly unpopular with their constituents.

Another driver is that as the parties have pulled further apart in their conflicting visions for how immigration should be handled, it’s made moving towards the middle that much more challenging. By definition, compromise means neither side gets what they want fully. How many Democrats are eager to vote for something that would tighten border control? And how many Republicans are willing to vote for increased immigration, even legal, these days? Increasingly, precious few. After all, the attack ads practically write themselves.

With Congress gridlocked on the issue, it is left to the executive branch to plug holes in a leaky boat—basically a disaster management approach. Anything beyond that on the president’s part is constitutionally dubious or highly controversial as we saw with former president Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or with former president Donald Trump’s travel ban. So it’s a patch and pray system, rather than a dock at a harbor and upgrade to a more modern vessel approach. 

There is also a cynical view, of course, which holds that politicians benefit from their constituents being fired up about the issue—and energized voters tend to go to the ballot box. So human suffering, economic inefficiency, and other issues created by our outdated system remain.

Glen Davis: I am always curious about the faith of reporters who write about religious organizations. If you’re willing to share, I’d love to know what kind of church you were raised in (if any) and what church you attend now (if any).

My family attended an Assemblies of God-affiliated church—which is a Pentecostal denomination in the Protestant church—for the first 10 or so years of my life, then went to a very tiny nondenominational church until I went to college. I attended a church plant that was Baptist in denomination in college. Since then, I’ve attended mostly nondenominational churches.

FRV Jr.: Most of my questions are already listed, so Harvest, why do you always have some reference to eggs on your Twitter page?

Hello, it’s become a bit of a meme, but jests aside, I really do harbor a fervent appreciation for eggs.

The backstory: When I first moved to Washington, D.C. my housemate at the time made a joke about how, for a girl, I went through eggs faster than a high school linebacker. Subsequent housemates would also comment on my penchant for them. Since then, I’ve reflected on it and realized the many virtues of eggs as a food choice. They are versatile, healthy, and, of utmost import for living in a very expensive city, cheap. I still eat two or three for breakfast each morning and feel a bit panicked if the fridge isn’t well-stocked with them. I also— similar to the father from My Big Fat Greek Wedding who treats Windex as the cure for everything—think eggs are a very good remedy for all manner of ills. So if one of my friends is coming down with a cold or suffering from heartbreak, one of my first solutions tends to be an offer to cook them an egg.