The Washington Post - USA (2022-06-09)

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THURSDAY, JUNE 9 , 2022. SECTION C EZ RE

JOHNNY DEPP

On morning TV, his

lawyers say he’s “over the

moon” about his legal win

against Amber Heard. C3

MEDIA

After Twitter strife,

The Washington Post’s

editor warns staff about

“attacking colleagues.” C6

CAROLYN HAX

When friends suggest you

see a counselor, they may

be seeing something that

you, in your pain, can’t. C9

KIDSPOST

In the summer collegiate

baseball leagues, the

stars of tomorrow shine

under the lights. C9

A film on pre-Roe could be a

haunting primer for the future

Several days ago an
acquaintance tweeted,
“Imagine you have been
kidnapped. The people
in charge of rescuing
you are the characters in
the latest thing you
watched on TV. Do you
survive?” I am relieved
to report that the last
thing I watched was a new HBO
documentary, “The Janes,” and my
odds of survival have never been
higher.
“The Janes” is about a collective of
women in pre- Roe v. Wade Chicago
who helped pregnant people secure

safe but illegal abortions. They

advertised on bulletin boards

(“Pregnant? Call Jane”), they worked

on a pay-what-you-can basis, and they

assisted with approximately eleven

thousand procedures in the early 1970s.

Now, in 2022, the demise of Roe v.

Wade could be imminent. And as some

of us are trying to wrap our heads

around what that might look like, “The

Janes” is a defiant examination of what

it did look like, at least for a subset of

determined activists living through a

time in which pregnant people were

dying daily of botched procedures

carried out via knitting needles and

SEE HESSE ON C4

Monica
Hesse

HBO

Members of the Janes, who helped people secure safe abortions, in 1972.

BY INKOO KANG

The two halves of high-schooler Ka-

mala Khan’s life initially seem unbridge-

able. By day, she’s a second-generation

Pakistani American teen with strict par-

ents and a low profile at school. By night,

she’s an Avengers stan, creating fan

videos of the battle against Thanos,

though her favorite is Captain Marvel,

the space-traveling former fighter pilot

played by Brie Larson in the movies.

In the first episode of “Ms. Marvel,” the

new Disney Plus adaptation of the comic,

the tension between the two aspects of

Kamala’s (newcomer Iman Vellani) exis-

tence manifests in her mom and dad

forbidding her from attending Avenger-

con, where the teen hoped to debut a

homemade Captain Marvel costume her

parents would deem too form-fitting.

Such is “Ms. Marvel’s” clever spin on

the age-old Asian American narrative

formula of straddling dual worlds. In its

first two episodes (the portion screened

for critics), the six-part YA series also

feels like a bisected unit — an earnest

step forward in Disney and Marvel’s

efforts to tell more diverse stories and an

SEE TV REVIEW ON C5

TV REVIEW

A captivating new hero — and more

Disney marketing — in ‘Ms. Marvel’

MARVEL STUDIOS

From left, Yasmeen Fletcher as Nakia, Matt Lintz as Bruno and Iman Vellani as

Kamala, a.k.a. Ms. Marvel, in Disney Plus’s adaptation of the comic.

BY MICHAEL DIRDA

Many people have favorite movie stars

and favorite musicians. For example,

mine are — to stick with the living — the

actor Jeremy Irons and the pianist Mar-

tha Argerich. However, being a bookish

lad, I also have a favorite intellectual,

Marina Warner. Past president of Brit-

ain’s Royal Society of Literature, Warner

specializes in the study of mythology,

religion and fairy tales, but also writes

art, film and cultural criticism, as well as

novels and short stories. Of her many

books, I’ve read only seven or eight, but

each has bowled me over, especially

“From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy

Tales and Their Tellers,” and “Stranger

Magic: Charmed Stories & the Arabian

Nights.”

In the sheer range of her learning,

Warner might be likened to the mid-20th-

century literary scholar Erich Auerbach;

the pioneering expert on the Renaissance

occult, Frances Yates; and art historian

Ernst Gombrich. But only the last comes

close to matching the suppleness and

pizazz of her prose. To show what I mean,

let me quote a longish paragraph from

her latest book, “Esmond and Ilia,” a

double portrait of her parents during the

first years of their marriage. Early in this

“Unreliable Memoir” — it is largely con-

structed from documents, family stories

and imaginative projection — Warner

conjures up the dashing young women

SEE BOOK WORLD ON C4

BOOK WORLD

A wonderfully

unreliable

memoir of

h er parents

BY DAN ZAK IN ANCHORAGE

O

n March 18, Rep. Don Young (R) was headed from his

expansive office on Capitol Hill — where the walls are

adorned with vintage firearms and the pelt of a grizzly

bear that Young claimed to have strangled with his own

hands — to America’s biggest congressional district, encom-

passing all of Alaska, which is larger than Texas, Montana and

California combined. Young was his usual self onboard the first

of three flights, from DCA to LAX: boisterous and chatty with

the passengers and crew.

Young was in reelection mode, running to retain his seat as he

had done 24 times before. His challengers at that point included

a libertarian fishing guide who refers to the Patriot Act as

“Stalin’s wet dream,” a jovial Mat-Su Valley independent named

Bob whose tattoo of the Cheshire cat declares in ink “WE’RE

ALL MAD HERE,” and Young’s former campaign co-chair, Nick

Begich III, a Republican member of an Alaska family known for

its Democratic politics. At 88, Young had guided Alaska’s

transformation from an Arctic kingdom colonized by prospec-

tors and military commanders into a pluralistic, oil-juiced

experiment in modern manifest destiny. Young himself evolved

from a frontiersman enticed by the lupine prose of Jack London

into a political chieftain who wrestled with Washington on

behalf of 734,323 Alaskans, from enlistees on brief tours

through lonely military bases to tribes that have subsisted for

millennia on whales, caribou and salmon. Nearly a half-century

SEE ALASKA ON C2

The cull of the wild

With 48 candidates after a House seat, Alaska is having the most chaotic election of 2022

ASH ADAMS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

A view of the Anchorage skyline in Alaska, where a packed special election is taking place to fill the final four months of Rep.

Don Young’s term. The Republican lawmaker, who held his post for decades, died in March at age 88.