Jill Smokler, a mother of three who started the blog “Scary Mommy” as a diversion from bedtime battles and toddler tantrums, and built it into a juggernaut that drew millions of readers to its pages, died on June 29 at her home in Pikesville, MD. She was 48. Ms. Smokler “built her life’s work on a single, radical idea,” her brother Matt Epstein said in a statement. “That you could love your children more than [...]

Mark Singer, a staff writer at The New Yorker from the age of 23 who extended the magazine’s franchise of rich reporting and witty prose about offbeat, complicated and quintessentially American characters, died on June 26 in Manhattan. He was 75. Mr. Singer wrote urbane “Talk of the Town” pieces for the front of the magazine, reflected on serious national matters, and did a hitch traveling the country as the correspondent for the “U.S. Journal” [...]

Judah Gribetz, who as a top aide to Gov. Hugh L. Carey played a key role in helping New York City avoid financial collapse in the 1970s, and who decades later devised a complex plan for distributing $1.25 billion in restitution to half a million Holocaust survivors in a class-action suit against Swiss banks, died on June 26 at his home in the Rockaway Park neighborhood of Queens. He was 97. The hundreds of thousands [...]

Louise Lasser, the deadpan comedic actress who began her screen career in Woody Allen movies and became a star as the title character of “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” died on July 6 at her home in Manhattan. She was 87. Articles about the series proliferated, and Ms. Lasser appeared on the covers of major magazines. She also did commercials for NyQuil and Excedrin, and was the first actress to win a Clio Award. She continued [...]

William D. Zabel, who played a pivotal role in voiding the criminal conviction of an interracial couple married in violation of Virginia law, and who wrested billions of dollars from Bernard L. Madoff’s Ponzi scheme by engineering what was at the time the largest civil forfeiture in American history, died on July 7 at his home in Bedford, NY. He was 89. Mr. Zabel drafted wills and negotiated prenuptial agreements and marital breakups for the [...]

Stanley M. Gartler , a molecular biologist and geneticist who helped provide the first convincing evidence that cancerous tumors develop from a single mutated cell involving the first collection of human cells to permanently thrive in a laboratory, died on May 25 at his home in Seattle. He was 102. In 1965, while studying genetic markers that vary in human cells, he found that in 18 supposedly independent cultures, the genetic markers were identical. It [...]

Leonard Abramson, a former pharmacist who built U.S. Healthcare, one of the first health Maintenance organizations, and who used some of the nearly $1 billion he received from selling it to give generously to cancer research and other medical causes, died on July 4 at his home in Blue Bell, PA. He was 93. During the 30 years following the sale of U.S. Healthcare, Mr. Abramson used his wealth for philanthropic causes: $100 million to [...]

Yaacov Agam, an Israeli artists whose brightly colored geometric sculptures and paintings delighted the eye with optical illusions and moving parts, and whose many public artworks included the world’s largest menorah and a rainbow-hued fountain that breathed fire and played music, died on June 18 at his home in Rishon LeZion, Israel. He was 98. Mr. Agam called his works Agamographs, and he created an eyepiece with prisms for viewing them, calling it the Agamoscope. [...]

Rudolph Marcus, a Canadian-born American chemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing a theory that helped explain the electrochemical processes behind photosynthesis, respiration, oxidation and even how fireflies produce light, died on July 17 at his home in Pasadena, CA. He was 102. Sarah Reisman, chair of the chemistry and chemical engineering division of the California Institute of Technology, where Dr. Marcus had taught since 1978, said that it was almost impossible [...]