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 anything in the world and still say, out loud, that the job is grindingly difficult.” In addition to her blog, which she started in 2008, she wrote three books.

When she started, her co-stars included her husband, Jeff Smokler, who traveled three days a week for business, three kids under 4, and Penelope, the family’s golden retriever.

“Motherhood,” Mrs. Smokler told Time Magazine, “was loud, chaotic, messy, and nothing like the magazine photos I stared at or the families I saw on TV.”

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” column. But he was best known as a profiler. His subjects included the magician Ricky Jay, a set of four doorman brothers in New York, and a braggadocious real estate developer named Donald Trump, years before he ran for office.

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 of claimants included people whose money, deposited in the banks to safeguard it from the Nazis, was not returned after WWII — enslaved laborers for German companies that had put their revenues in the banks, people whose Nazi-looted property was disposed of through Swiss institutions, members of the Romani community, disabled and gay people, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Mr. Gribetz has been given a “Solomonic role,” The Forward said, in having “to adjudicate between the competing needs of different groups of aging Holocaust survivors, from Florida to Ukraine. By 2020, when the last distributions were made, nearly $1.288 billion — an amount larger than the original settlement because of accumulated interest — had been distributed or allocated to more than 458,400 claimants.

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 appearing in films and did guest appearances on various sitcoms. New York Times critic John J. O’Connor wrote that Ms. Lasser “had an uncanny ability to touch as well as tickle.”

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 rich and famous — among them George Soros, Rupert Murdoch, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Howard Stern, Doris Duke, Jack Welch, and Claus von Bülow. He often said he considered his greatest legacy to be his role in Loving v. Virginia, the case in which the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the conviction of Mildred Loving, a Black woman, and Richard Loving, a white man. Mr. Zabel was the lead author of the pivotal amicus brief supporting the Lovings, which proved persuasive. The decision enshrined marriage as a fundamental right under the 14th Amendment, which provides for “equal protection of the laws.”

Mr. Zabel also play an essential role in enabling compensation for victims of the fraud scheme that Mr. Madoff ran. Of the more than $4 billion made available to victims, approximately $2.2 billion was collected as part of the civil-forfeiture recovery from the Picower estate that Mr. Zabel negotiated. An additional $1.7 billion was collected as part of a deferred prosecution agreement with JPMorgan Chase. The settlements enabled victims of the Ponzi scheme to be compensated.

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 became clear to him that the supposedly unique cells had become contaminated by the first permanent human cell line called the HeLa line, an abbreviation of the first and last names of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman who had died of cervical cancer in 1951. Her genetic information harvested from a tissue biopsy shortly before her death had been shipped and studied in laboratories around the world without her consent or her family’s knowledge.

Dr. Gartler’s discovery has been credited as a catalyst for improved quality control in labs and enhanced authentication of cell lines. The story of the HeLa line became one of the defining lessons of 20th-century medicine, and raised important ethical questions about informed consent of patients, privacy and the rights of families to receive compensation for research on a relative’s cells.

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 establish the Leonard and Madlyn Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute at the University of Pennsylvania’s cancer center; later contributions to the cancer center brought the total to more than $140 million; $15 million to help start the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s pediatric research center; $10 million to Temple University’s dental school; $2.5 million to the pediatric emergency department of the children’s hospital in King of Prussia, PA, and $10 million to the Jupiter Medical Center in Florida.