Her son Sebastian confirmed her death in an Instagram post Wednesday, noting that “she wanted to share her journey after her accident and brain surgery, so I thought she would appreciate one last post sharing the news to people who supported her.”

Roughly three weeks earlier, Ban had posted on her Instagram account to reveal the news of her skiing accident. In the caption of a photo where she had her head partly shaved and was lying in bed, Ban said she had a life-changing skiing accident in Aspen, Colorado, on Christmas Eve.

The jewelry designer said at the time that she had been cleared by ski patrol, who had checked her for a concussion, after skiing to the bottom of the mountain and that her fall “didn’t seem that bad at the time,” even though she had a bit of headache. A paramedic suggested that she go to a hospital for a CT scan, where a brain bleed was detected. Ban said that she was then airlifted to a trauma hospital, adding: “Last thing I remember was being intubated and waking up after an emergency craniotomy.”

Ban, who was from Singapore, designed fine jewelry that adorned some of the world’s most recognizable artists and celebrities, including Rihanna, Beyoncé, Cardi B, Billie Eilish, Madonna, Lady Gaga, Kendrick Lamar and Post Malone. According to her website, Ban also worked with Rihanna on jewelry for her tours, appearances, music videos and her Fenty x Puma collections.

Ban often set precious stones like diamonds in oxidized metals to create visual contrast.

For a 2017 article in The New York Times, Ban talked about her signature armor rings, including a piece she created for Rihanna to wear in photographs for W Magazine. Told to imagine the pop star as the last woman in a postapocalyptic world, Ban created a claw armor ring, an articulated design that stretches up the finger and ends in a clawlike pointed tip. “It continues the theme of my signature armor ring but is even more protective,” she said. “It’s like a weapon.”

Ban added that it was no coincidence that the piece was created during a time of political flux. “Revolution and social protest have always sparked intense periods of creativity,” Ban said. “Just look at the 1960s.”

In a statement Wednesday, Jeff Jenkins, the founder and president of Jeff Jenkins Productions, which produced Bling Empire and Bling Empire: New York, called Ban “a genuine original.”

“Our entire Bling Empire family, in front of and behind the camera, is shocked and deeply saddened,” he said. “To experience Lynn was to receive a big slice of joy.”

Edward Dwight is going to space, finally.

In the coming weeks, as conditions allow, Denver’s Dwight is expected to be part of a six-person crew heading into space on the latest mission of Blue Origin, the space company founded by Jeff Bezos. Blue Origin’s seventh human flight will carry an array of adventurers including a venture capitalist, a craft-beer entrepreneur from France, a retired accountant who has been told by doctors that she is going blind and Dwight, a retired Air Force captain who 60 years ago was chosen, and then passed over, to be the first Black man to orbit Earth.

Dwight wound up in the astronaut training program at Edwards Air Force Base in California in the early 1960s under the command of Chuck Yeager. (In 1947 Yeager became the first test pilot to break the sound barrier; he died in 2020.) Dwight was a charismatic, handsome test pilot, a public relations dream for an administration looking to lead on civil rights. President John F. Kennedy was a supporter, but Yeager was not impressed; according to a well-chronicled history, Yeager described Dwight as an average pilot who had been placed on the A-list for political reasons. Dwight had a different account, recalling Yeager as a racist who wanted him removed. His height — 5 feet 4 inches — was also a disadvantage, Dwight recalled.

After the assassination of Kennedy in 1963, Dwight was not selected to go to space. The would-be astronaut left the Air Force in 1966 and went on to other successes, including as a restaurateur and real estate developer in Colorado and, eventually, as a celebrated sculptor of prominent figures in Black history.

In conversations spanning several months, Dwight spoke to The New York Times about his impending spaceflight. The interviews have been condensed and edited for clarity.

Q: How do you feel about going to space?

A: It’s a culmination of a long life of events. I’ve thought this would be a nice end of a fascinating story about all I’ve gone through and my reaction to adverse conditions.

Everything I’ve done has been an uphill battle: getting into the military and being an Air Force pilot, getting chosen by the president of the United States to be the first Black astronaut, and facing all kinds of obstacles in the years that I was in that program. But I was performing well, and that’s why they would say, ‘Oh my God, this guy’s getting things done,’ and my Blackness and my shortness didn’t mean a damn thing.

Then, after I left the Air Force, I came to Colorado and became a big-time businessman — and then started an art career at the age of 45. My whole life has been about getting things done. This is the culmination.

q: What is your prevailing emotion now — anger? That you’ve been lucky? Or something else?

A: I’m not angry and I’m not lucky; neither of those things is in my mind. When you get angry, your brain stops working. I couldn’t even think about getting angry or disappointed about anything; that’s my psychological makeup, I guess. When I came across people that might have caused me a setback, I rationalized: Why did they feel that way?

Chuck Yeager was taught as a kid that Black people were ignorant and stupid and couldn’t do a damn thing. He and I had conversations about it, and so, no, I had no anger toward him. People are products of their background, and there wasn’t a damn thing I was going to do to change his attitude.

The only thing I could do was show Yeager that I could do anything that was expected of me and transcend. In no way could he throw me out or get rid of me.

Q: Why would he want you thrown out?

A: We’d have these conversations, and this guy would pull out a sheet of paper that he carried — a folded piece of yellow, lined paper that had all these names — and he’d say, “Captain Dwight, I got 100 and 50 white boys on this list, and every one of these white boys are more qualified than you to be a test pilot.”

And I’d say: “So are you telling me that all these white guys are superior? Every street at Edwards is named after a dead test pilot, and every one of those guys is white and dead. They had to have made mistakes somewhere along the line to have a street named after them. Don’t come to me with this stuff about how smart and witty and brilliant and able white people are versus Black people.”

There were 17 people in my class, and I finished seventh. I had to remind him of that.

Q: You faced numerous obstacles to getting to space.

A: The power brokers were not going to give the last frontier to a Black person or a woman.

So, now, a guy who didn’t get to fly into space when he was supposed to, is going at 90, at the end of his career. Some people think of that as justice. But I don’t think that way. It seems far too late for it to be justice. My philosophy is that everything has a time and place. This is a natural occurrence that should have happened at some point.

Q: What do you think you will see when you’re up there?>

A: During my flight-test days, I went high enough to see the curvature of Earth, the totality of the land, to look at Earth as a big ball. But I am curious. We’re laying down in the capsule, and you’ve got this big panoramic window. I’m definitely putting this in my gee-whiz file.

Q: Care to add anything?

A: America is the guiding light of the world. Anybody who thinks about running for national office should take at least three orbits around Earth as a prerequisite. They should look down at how valuable it is and how sacred it is and how fragile.

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Small, soft-spoken and eager to please, she welcomed me warmly, but the coq au vin blanc meatballs and coffee-frosted pumpkin spice cake were not to be. “That cake takes two days to make,” she said.

Instead, her staple white chicken chili simmered in a pumpkin-shaped Dutch oven. She sliced apples and toasted pumpkin seeds for her fall harvest salad before moving on to her favorite part of the process: arranging the shot. She tucked and pulled the greens, fanned out the apples so they looked plush and dotted the shiny seeds on top.

“I’ve always been about the visuals,” she said of her recipe-development process. “I work backward from how I want it to look.”

Since 2012, Gerard has published a new recipe on Half Baked Harvest nearly every day, each illustrated by dozens of photos and videos that she shoots here in the hilltop compound where she also lives. This fire hose of new content keeps her followers — 5.4 million on Instagram alone — well-fed and loyal. Celebrities like Gigi and Bella Hadid, Emma Roberts and Blake Lively extended her reach during the pandemic, with posts about cooking her recipes at home.

From the beginning, her recipes — many of them cheesy, crispy, creamy or a combination — hit a sweet spot between approachable and aspirational. She burrowed into it, thanking and responding to fans around the clock.

“I feel like I grew up with her,” said Tina Nowak, 34, who said she often uses all three Half Baked Harvest cookbooks in her kitchen outside Chicago.

But Gerard has also become an unwilling lightning rod for controversy, entangled in issues that have galvanized the food world in the last decade: cultural appropriation, intellectual property, body shaming, privilege and racism.

Half Baked Harvest began as a chronicle of the big family dinners Gerard cooked for her parents, brothers and sisters — her seven siblings range in age from 3 to 38. Her intense productivity, paired with lifelong anxieties that have kept her near family, helped her build one of the food world’s most consistently successful platforms.

“I love the work, and I have to be creative,” because she spends so much of her life at home, she said.

Eleven years later, much remains the same for Gerard, who turned 30 in September. She has lived here since she was 14, apart from a brief attempt at fashion school in Los Angeles that was cut short by homesickness. Her mother, Jen, 57, still runs the business side of Half Baked Harvest from her house a few hundred yards up the hill. She still doesn’t like to drive, and she hasn’t traveled outside North America except to watch her brother, snowboarder Red Gerard, win a gold medal at the 2018 Olympic Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

And Gerard’s recipes are still essential cooking for thousands of women living between America’s coasts, including her 700,000 daily email subscribers and the more than 2 million readers of her cookbooks. The 25- to 44-year-old women who make up her core demographic are still fiercely loyal; she said that 60% of subscribers open her newsletter every day, a stunningly high number.

But just as much has changed. Gerard, who is white, has long been called out for mispronouncing dishes from other cultures and misidentifying her creations, like calling tacos with pineapple “Hawaiian” and noodles with honey and peanut butter “Chinese.”

But the objections have intensified since 2021, when she posted a recipe for “pho” that was wildly unrelated to the Vietnamese dish, and many longtime fans spoke out about her pattern of disrespecting foods from nonwhite cultures. She apologized, promising to “do more research.”

When it happened again last March, this time with a “banh mi rice bowl,” the pushback was so strong that it was covered by NBC News. Gerard apologized again. (Both recipes remain on the site, with tweaked titles.)

“I think she is somewhat ignorant about other cultures, but in a sincerely interested way,” said Andrea Nguyen, a Vietnamese American food expert, who said she sympathized with the relentless demand for new content and praised Gerard’s work ethic. “In an ideal world, her mistakes would inspire people to do more research and less name-calling.”

Recently, Gerard published a “Thai” beef stew sweetened with pomegranate juice, an ingredient traditional in Middle Eastern cooking.

“I think she’s a great food stylist,” said Hannah Selinger, who writes about food and restaurants. “But why isn’t she more interested in food, and why does she get a seat at the table when there are so many people who actually know this stuff?”

Detractors have also flooded her comment sections when fellow bloggers, like Gaby Dalkin of What’s Gaby Cooking and Adrianna Guevara Adarme of A Cozy Kitchen, publicly accused Gerard of copying their recipes. Her recipes and persona have generated so much online conflict that most of the sources I contacted refused to go on the record.

Gerard characterized her missteps as respectful enthusiasm for flavors from other cultures. Her critics say she enjoys unearned privilege because of her wealth and whiteness; she says she has worked hard for a decade to earn her following and success. They say she has no particular cooking skills and posts the same recipes over and over again; she says she meets her readers where they are.

When Gerard began Half Baked Harvest on WordPress in 2012, Instagram was only two years old, and she was a 19-year-old with a photography hobby.

Few knew then just how much Instagram, YouTube and other visual media would determine what the world wanted to eat. From the start, Gerard’s dishes, photographed in warm, high-altitude light, looked bountiful and beautiful — and homemade.

“I felt like I didn’t have to know a lot about cooking to be able to do what she did,” said Erica Vargas, a longtime Half Baked Harvest fan.

At first, home cooks — especially the large cohort of millennials who were just starting their own households — were drawn to her family life as much as to her recipes. Unlike other domestic goddesses like Ina Garten and Joanna Gaines, Gerard was young, unmarried and a proudly inexpert cook. Her parents spent little time in the kitchen when she was growing up, she said. Unable to tolerate the nightly chaos that was dinnertime, she started doing the cooking herself.

She learned how entirely from the internet. Where Julia Child studied with professional chefs, and Martha Stewart built her empire on a catering business, Gerard cites restaurant menus and other food websites as her culinary inspiration. Her studio kitchen holds six KitchenAid mixers, but no cookbooks. (KitchenAid, among other companies, sponsored the building of her studio.)

Her breakthrough moment came in 2017, when Anthropologie, the fashion and lifestyle retailer, began stocking her first cookbook. Her most recent book, “Half Baked Harvest Every Day,” published in 2022 during the pandemic, spent 33 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

Gerard is a regular on “Good Morning America” and “Today,” has her own line of candles, touts cosmetic brands and recently collaborated with Home Chef, the meal-kit delivery service owned by Kroger.

But she also devotes considerable resources to the persistent online critics who parse her likes, scour her photos and analyze her body language. Gerard now has four full-time and two part-time employees; part of their job is to delete negative comments across her blog and social media accounts, creating an online echo chamber where she feels safe.

“I follow people who make me feel good,” she said. She dismisses most criticism of her as “internet hate” and said the vast majority of her audience are fans.

On Reddit, where her staff cannot moderate conversations, anonymous commenters publish detailed theories about her motivations and inner demons to a weekly “snark” thread dedicated to her. In October, members of the FoodieSnark subreddit monitored geotags in Chicago to track how many fans showed up at a promotional appearance for her new pumpkin-spice candle.

“People have kindly called her out and not-so kindly called her out,” said Hanna, a contributor to the thread who declined to provide her surname in order to avoid online harassment. “At this point it’s bizarre that she never seems to take accountability or learn from her mistakes.”

The criticism that bothers Gerard most is more personal: that beneath all of the melted cheese and creamy sauces, she is concealing a chronic eating disorder. Day after day, followers — some with concern, others with vitriol — accuse her of peddling high-fat, high-calorie food while never eating it herself.

Gerard said she does not have an eating disorder but has long suffered from social anxiety and separation anxiety. She said that she is treating those “privately,” and that she calms herself with long hours of work, often forgetting to eat and sleep.

Her mother, also a small and intense woman, said the constant online discussion of Gerard’s body feels sexist and judgmental. “It’s unfortunate that people feel entitled to comment on someone being underweight, when they would never do that if the person was overweight,” she said.

Despite her success in the food world, Gerard is now trying to elbow her way out of it. She built Half Baked Harvest on a homespun, rustic image, but now she wears Bottega Veneta cashmere sweaters, promotes $500 red-light anti-aging masks and posts breathlessly from runway shows at New York Fashion Week.

The Half Baked Harvest site is no longer exclusively a destination for recipes, as Gerard tirelessly posts links to clothes, jewelry and hotels, luring visitors to linger inside her bubble. “I want those clickbacks,” she said firmly. “TikTok could go away any minute. I don’t own Instagram, but the site is all mine.”

The approaching holidays are her favorite time of year — and the busiest time for her site: According to Jen Gerard, November and December each bring in 23 million to 25 million page views. But Tieghan Gerard dreads the technical questions they always bring, like how to safely defrost a turkey or how to modify a recipe based on high-altitude cooking. (Silverthorne is more than 8,000 feet above sea level.)

“How would I know that?” she said. “I’m not Google.”

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Things move fast with barely a beat of introduction. Those unfamiliar with American philanthropists Kristine McDivitt Tompkins and her husband, Douglas Tompkins, may feel in the film’s opening minutes as disoriented as if they’ve been dropped in the wilderness. One catches on that the Tompkinses purchased a lot of it: more than 1 million acres in Argentina and Chile, with the goal of gifting the land back as recognized national parks. The scale of the couple’s ambition teeters on the surreal. Asked in archival footage about a massive snow-flocked volcano on the horizon, Doug casually replies, “Yeah, that came with it.”

The film doesn’t do much besides pair snippets of the Tompkins’ biographies with staggeringly beautiful shots of Patagonia’s natural splendors. An early effort to structure the running time around Kris’ first summit of a mountain named in her honor by her husband, who died in 2015, unspools clumsily and is eventually set aside.

Chin, a climber himself, joined Kris on the trek and must have decided the footage was less interesting than the story that brought her and Doug to Chile in the first place — an unusual adventure in 20th-century capitalism that begins in 1968 with Doug and his friend Yvon Chouinard embarking on a nine-month van expedition through South America and returning home to each start apparel companies: one would found Esprit; the other, Patagonia.

These two mountaineers on the precipice of great wealth were also free-spirited “dirtbags,” a word Chin uses with reverence. Yvon doesn’t disagree, explaining, “If you want to understand the entrepreneur, study the juvenile delinquent.” Yvon would soon hire a teenage Kris to work at Patagonia as an assistant packer; she rose to become CEO. In her 40s, Kris met and married Doug, completing the loop.

Chin and Vasarhelyi, married themselves, understand the unity and isolation couples experience when spurred by a shared goal. The details of negotiating this staggering land donation with Chile’s former president, Michelle Bachelet, include a moment of suspense that’s hard to follow. (The filmmakers seem too shy to ask questions about costs and legal clauses.) But what is clear is the Tompkins’ twin passions for nature and romance, which merge in the metaphors Kris uses to describe her husband’s effect on her life: “You get hit by lightning,” she beams, adding later, “Once, I was a pebble in a stream. Not anymore.”

Kris and Doug’s moving love story should be the emotional foundation of the documentary, but it’s edited in a bit too late. Paradoxically, however, we also crave more scenes of their individual transitions from bohemians to business titans. We’re tantalized by a glimpse of Patagonia meetings held barefoot and cross-legged on the corporate carpet, an allusion to Yvon and Doug’s competition to run the most ethical company (although there’s no need for the klutzy needle-drop of the Tears for Fears hit “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”), and a hasty mention of Doug’s efforts to course-correct the environmentally destructive fast-fashion industry with a 1990 Esprit advertisement asking mall rat teenagers whether their clothes are “something you really need.” I’d watch a real-time documentary on just that next board meeting.

“Wild Life”

Rated: PG-13

Run time: 93 minutes

Where: in theaters

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The Boulder man who set himself on fire in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on Earth Day apparently acted in protest of inaction on climate change.

Wynn Bruce, 50, a climate activist, died Saturday, a day after his actions in front of the nation’s highest court in Washington, D.C. He was airlifted for treatment but did not survive.

Kritee Kanko, who described herself as Bruce’s friend and a Zen Buddhist priest in Boulder, said on Twitter that Bruce’s actions were a planned protest.

“This is a deeply fearless act of compassion to bring attention to climate crisis,” she said in a tweet.

She declined to comment further when reached by The Denver Post on Sunday, saying she needed time to grieve.

However, she told The New York Times she was not completely sure of Bruce’s motivations, the newspaper reported, saying that “people are being driven to extreme amounts of climate grief and despair” and that “what I do not want to happen is that young people start thinking about self-immolation.”

There are indications that Bruce had contemplated this action for some time.

On his Facebook page, Bruce posted in October 2020 about a free educational course about climate change. A year ago, on April 20, 2021, he added a comment to that post: “4-1-1,” an apparent reference to the directory-assistance telephone number people used to call for information.

Then, in October 2021, he added a fire emoji to that comment, according to a publicly visible edit history. Earlier this month, on April 2, Bruce added the date that he would set himself on fire. The final message read: “4-1-1 (fire emoji) 4/22/2022.”

His family did not return requests for comment Sunday.

Bruce, who had lived in Boulder since 2000, identified as Buddhist and had worked as a photographer. He referenced and shared the teachings of Shambhala Buddhism, founded in Boulder, on his Facebook page.

Jessie Friedman, executive director of the Boulder Shambhala Center, did not return a request for comment Sunday. Shambhala International is now based in Canada but maintains deep roots in Boulder.

Brianna Burch, a spokeswoman for the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C., said Sunday that, to her knowledge, investigators did not find any sort of manifesto or note with Bruce’s body. She said police were still looking into his motive.

Bruce set himself on fire in an apparent imitation of Vietnamese monks who burned themselves to death in protest during the Vietnam War. His Facebook page commemorated the death of Thich Nhat Hanh, an influential Zen Buddhist master and anti-war activist who died in January.

Thich Nhat Hanh, in a letter he wrote in 1965 to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., had idolized those monks. Kritee cited that letter in another tweet on Bruce’s death Sunday morning.

“The press spoke then of suicide, but in the essence, it is not. It is not even a protest,” Thich Nhat Hanh wrote of the monks, adding that “to burn oneself by fire is to prove that what one is saying is of the utmost importance. There is nothing more painful than burning oneself. To say something while experiencing this kind of pain is to say it with utmost courage, frankness, determination and sincerity.”

The U.S. Supreme Court had heard arguments in late February on an important environmental case that could restrict or even eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to control pollution. The court’s conservative majority had voiced skepticism of the agency’s authority to regulate carbon emissions, suggesting that a decision by the justices could deal a sharp blow to the Biden administration’s efforts to address climate change.

Bruce’s Facebook page frequently spoke of climate change activism, as well as Buddhism.

Kritee told The New York Times that the last time Bruce had communicated with her was in a Facebook message he had sent in January, asking if she had seen his post praising climate activist Greta Thunberg.

She added that if she or any other Buddhist teacher in Boulder had known of his plan to set himself on fire, they would have discouraged him from doing so.

There have been previous instances of public self-immolation over climate change. David Buckel, a prominent civil rights lawyer turned environmental advocate, set himself on fire in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park in 2018 to protest climate change and died. In a letter beforehand, Buckel alluded to the spiritual roots of self-immolation in protests, including in Tibet.

And in Washington, Arnav Gupta burned himself in front of the White House in 2019 and later died of his injuries. A motive in that case was never determined. Mohamed Alanssi, a Yemeni-born FBI informant, set himself on fire outside the White House in 2004 in protest of his treatment by the government, but he survived. Norman R. Morrison, a Quaker man, burned himself to death outside the Pentagon in 1965 in protest of the Vietnam War.

Portions of this article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Before she married her husband, Kiersten Little considered him ideal father material. “We were always under the mentality of ‘Oh yeah, when you get married, you have kids,” she said. “It was this expected thing.”

Expected, that is, until the couple took an eight-month road trip after Little got her master’s degree in public health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“When we were out West — California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho — we were driving through areas where the whole forest was dead, trees knocked over,” Little said. “We went through southern Louisiana, which was hit by two hurricanes last year, and whole towns were leveled, with massive trees pulled up by their roots.”

Now 30 and two years into her marriage, Little feels “the burden of knowledge,” she said. The couple see mounting disaster when reading the latest climate change reports and Arctic ice forums. Anxiety about having children has set in.

“Over the last year I thought, ‘Oh my God, I have to make a decision; it’s not that far away,’” she said. “But I don’t know how I could change my mind. Over the next 10 years, I feel like there are only going to be more reasons to not want to have a kid, not the other way around.”

Such fears are not necessarily unfounded. Every new human comes with a carbon footprint.

In a note to investors this past summer, Morgan Stanley analysts concluded that the “movement to not have children owing to fears over climate change is growing and impacting fertility rates quicker than any preceding trend in the field of fertility decline.”

There is much debate, however, over the idea that having fewer children is the best way to address the problem. In an interview with Vox in April, Kimberly Nicholas, a climate scientist and co-author of a 2017 study of the most effective lifestyle changes to reduce climate impact, said that population reduction was not the answer.

“It is true that more people will consume more resources and cause more greenhouse gas emissions,” Nicholas said. “But that’s not really the relevant time frame for actually stabilizing the climate, given that we have this decade to cut emissions in half.”

Nevertheless, the concern seems to be gaining traction. Among childless adults in the United States surveyed by Morning Consult last year, 1 in 4 cited climate change as a factor in why they do not currently have children.

Another poll in 2018 by Morning Consult for The New York Times found that among young adults in the United States who said they had or expected to have fewer children than the number they considered ideal, 33% listed climate change, while 27% named population growth as a concern.

While economic concerns remained paramount, with 64% citing the high cost of child care, 37% cited global instability and 36%, domestic politics. To some, those issues are all rolled together. In 2020, the birthrate in the United States declined for the sixth straight year, a dip of 4% believed to be accelerated by the pandemic.

The trauma from nearly two years of coronavirus has also given some prospective parents pause. For Marguerite Middaugh, a 41-year-old lawyer in San Diego, the pandemic, coupled with climate-related devastation, prompted her to hold off on fertility treatments for a first child. “Seeing people not getting vaccinated, not taking care of their community,” she said. “That really made me pause about whether I want to bring a child into this world.”

While spiraling housing costs, college-debt burdens, not to mention the so-called sex recession for millennials (the oldest of whom are now 40) factor into family planning for many, existential threats, too, are now part of the procreation calculus.

A rise in political extremism, at home and abroad. A pandemic that has killed more than 5 million. Thousand-year floods that wiped out western European towns. West Coast wildfires that grow more unimaginable in scale each summer. Faced with such alarming news, some prospective parents wonder: How harmful might it be to bring a child into this (literal and figurative) environment?

To Jenna Ross, 36, a potter who lives near Fredericton in New Brunswick, her decision to remain childless in a world threatened by climate change springs from a protective instinct. “Harnessing the love I have for my unborn hypothetical kid comforts me in sparing them an inhospitable future,” she said. “In this way, my choice feels like an act of love.”

Such views do not always travel across lines of geography, politics or social class — particularly since climate change is often painted as a partisan, not scientific, issue in the political arena. In the 2018 New York Times survey, the people who cited climate change as a reason to have fewer children were significantly more likely to be college-educated and Democrats, and slightly more likely to be white, nonreligious and high earners.

Educated professionals also have greater access to abortion and birth control, and the economic means to choose either lifestyle course, although recent restrictions on abortion in Texas, for example, also complicate the procreation calculus.

Regardless, such questions are creeping into the cultural dialogue in a manner that recalls the hippie-era “ecology” movement, when “The Population Bomb,” the seismic 1968 bestseller by Stanford University biologist Paul R. Ehrlich, predicted a barren, exhausted planet where hundreds of millions would die in famines during the 1970s.

Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez both have broached the question in recent years, with Ocasio-Cortez, in a 2019 Instagram Live, asserting “a scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult,” which leads “young people to have a legitimate question: Is it OK to still have children?”

Celebrities including Miley Cyrus and Seth Rogen have also raised the issue, as have writers like New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and Katha Pollitt, the poet and essayist.

“Does the world need more people?” Pollitt wrote in an essay in The Nation in June. “Not if you ask the glaciers, the rainforests, the air, or the more than 37,400 species on the verge of extinction thanks to the relentless expansion of human beings into every corner and cranny of our overheated planet.”

While climate change is hardly a new concern, the worsening crisis has forced the issue for many prospective parents, said Josephine Ferorelli, a founder of Conceivable Future, an organization that hosts house parties for prospective parents to discuss how climate fears are shaping their reproductive lives.

“Something happened this past summer,” Ferorelli said. “Three months ago, our inbox was empty. But in the past two months, we’ve been hearing from people all over the country who are upset and distraught.”

No wonder some people who put off having children to pursue careers or other interests now wonder if the kindest thing for their unborn is to keep them that way.

“I literally can’t go to a dinner party without the collapse of a civilization being at least mentioned, if not being the main topic of conversation,” said Myka McLaughlin, 40, who runs a company in Boulder, Colorado, that helps women build profitable businesses. “Arable land is decreasing around the planet. We might not have enough food. We’ve lost 80% of the biomass in the ocean in the last century; the ocean is essentially dying.”

Since college, McLaughlin has worried that humankind was on an unsustainable path. Even so, “at 27, I decided to have children and get married, in that order,” she said. Her first marriage, however, ended without children at 32. “He was a salt-of-the-earth farmer who wanted to live in the mountains,” she said. “I was a global citizen who wanted to travel and read The New Yorker.”

By the time she entered a serious relationship in her late 30s, she was having grave doubts about bringing children into a troubled world. “His perspective was, we really need children who are well raised and well loved who can be leaders in our future for what is to come, which I think is a totally valid point,” McLaughlin said. She, however, now struggles to justify bringing a child into a world she fears may be on the brink. The couple broke up this summer.

“When I see a beautiful young baby, my heart melts, just totally melts,” McLaughlin said. But at this point it might take a major life epiphany to change her mind.

Political strife, both domestically and abroad, is also a factor for some.

“With my past partner, we both decided that if Trump got reelected in 2020, we were not going to engage in having children, primarily because the climate would be irreparable and probably extremely devastating,” said Hannah Evans, 33, a senior analyst for Population Connection, formerly Zero Population Growth, the prominent population-stabilization organization that Ehrlich helped found in the 1960s.

Like many professional women, Middaugh, the lawyer in San Diego, put off having children through her 20s and 30s as she built her career and grappled with student loans. When she was around 36, however, she decided it was time to act.

She and her husband had a difficult time conceiving, so they began fertility treatments shortly before the pandemic, when she was 39. Then came the lockdown. The fertility clinic closed for months. She had time to consider the world her child might face.

Not only was she horrified by the lack of a unified response to the coronavirus, but on a trip home to Alaska, she visited beaches that, as a child, she remembered teeming with starfish, otters and fat, briny mussels, but now seemed denuded of wildlife.

It was too much. She postponed her plans for IVF, although her husband is still pushing. “I’ve been asking myself, ‘If I don’t have a baby or at least really try, will I be sad or regret it forever?’” she said. “I don’t know, and can’t really know, but I don’t want to let that alone push me into making a choice to go ahead with trying.”

Such questions are not confined to heterosexual women in monogamous relationships. Single women, husbands, gay couples, as well as people found on any point of the gender spectrum, all have the choice to procreate — and the choice not to.

“As I think of it, having a child is like rolling dice with the child’s life in an increasingly uncertain world,” said Michael Ellsberg, 44, a writer in Berkeley, California. “Sure we might figure out how to limit global warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius. We might figure out how to cooperate as a globe to prevent future pandemics. We might figure out how to limit the risks of nuclear war and terrorism. But we might not.”

Ellsberg follows “The Exploring Antinatalism Podcast” and other such outlets, and after two breakups in which his desire not to have children was a major factor, he had a vasectomy to cement his decision.

Doomsday fears are hardly the only reason that some choose the child-free lifestyle.

“I was raised in a family that did not try to condition me as a girl-mommy-to-be,” said LiLi Roquelin, 41, a married, French-born singer-songwriter who lives in Queens. She counts herself a proud member of the so-called childfree by choice movement, celebrated on social media under hashtags like #childfree and #neverkids, and recently posted a self-penned anthem of sorts called “Childfree.”

Even so, she said that women who choose not to reproduce often face intense social pressure from family, friends, even medical professionals. “Over the years, I have been criticized as inhuman or unloving,” she said. “In my mid-30s, my gynecologist kept telling me that my hormones would run out.”

For her, such pushback is merely the price you pay. Roquelin said she enjoys a rich and fulfilling life without children, and is now studying for a master’s degree in business administration to capitalize on her music career. “I have many more things to explore on my journey,” she said, “that do not involve raising other suffering human beings on an out-of-supplies planet.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Unionized workers who make Oreos, Chips Ahoy!, Newtons and other Nabisco snacks are on strike in five states over what they say are unfair demands for concessions in contract negotiations.

Members of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers union in Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Oregon and Virginia have rejected management’s call for changes in shift lengths and overtime rules. The workers are also calling for the restoration of a pension plan, which Nabisco’s owner, Mondelez International, replaced in 2018 with a 401(k) program after a contract impasse.

“We want our pension back. We earned that,” Mike Burlingham, vice president of Local 364 in Portland, Oregon, said in an interview. “This is a good job, where people plan for retirement. If the company could have their way, that would be gone, and it wouldn’t be a job worth fighting for at all.”

The union put the number of striking workers at more than 1,000.

The previous contract expired in May. Union workers say they have often put in 16-hour days as demand for snack foods has increased during the pandemic.

The company is seeking schedules in which some employees would have shifts of up to 12 hours without overtime pay but would work fewer days a week. Those on weekend shifts, previously eligible for extra pay, would get the premium only after working 40 hours in a week. In addition, new hires would pay more than other employees for health insurance.

“Our goal has been — and continues to be — to bargain in good faith,” Mondelez International said in a statement, “while also taking steps to modernize some contract aspects which were written several decades ago.”

The strike began in Portland on Aug. 10, and workers in Aurora; Richmond, Va.; Chicago; and Norcross, Ga., followed suit as recently as Monday. The company said production was continuing with employees not under union jurisdiction.

The approximately 30 workers at the Nabisco plant in Aurora have been on strike since Aug. 12. Rusty Lewis, the local union steward, and Clifton Horton, president of the Local 26, said Tuesday there has been little progress in negotiations. Lewis, who has worked for Nabisco for 25 years, said some employees who were thinking about planning to retire weren’t able to after the company withdrew from the pension. He said the company wants employees to pay more for health care and eliminate premium pay for weekend shifts.

“All the while, all through last year and this year, through the pandemic and all of that, they’ve had record sales and they’ve sustained sales this year,” Lewis said. “And all of last year we were working 14- to 16-hour days, six seven days a week.”

The employees, considered essential workers, were putting themselves in harm’s way during the pandemic, Lewis added.

“Basically we’re just asking them, don’t take anything from us,” Lewis said. “You’re having record sales. Profits are up. They already took our pension, they don’t need to take anything else.”

Union members say they have been treated unfairly while Mondelez International has made strong financial gains amid the pandemic. The company reported a 12% gain in revenue for the three months ending in June compared with the same quarter a year earlier.

The workers have also called for the company to “stop exporting our jobs to Mexico.” Some Oreo production was shifted to Mexico in 2016, a move that was criticized by Donald Trump as a presidential candidate. This year, Nabisco plants were shut in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, and Atlanta, but Mondelez said no work there was sent to Mexico.

The union “will take all appropriate action necessary in order to reach a contract settlement that treats Nabisco workers fairly and equitably,” Anthony Shelton, president of the union, said in a statement.

Denver Post reporter Judith Kohler contributed to this report.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

DURANGO — The last day Dzabahe remembers praying in the way of her ancestors was on the morning in the 1950s when she was taken to the boarding school.

At first light, she grabbed a small pouch and ran out into the desert to a spot facing the rising sun to sprinkle the taa dih’deen — or corn pollen — to the four directions, offering honor for the new day.

Within hours of arriving at the school, she was told not to speak her own Navajo language. The leather skirt her mother had sewn for her and the beaded moccasins were taken away and bundled in plastic, like garbage.

She was given a dress to wear and her long hair was cut — something that is taboo in Navajo culture. Before she was sent to the dormitory, one more thing was taken: her name.

“You have a belief system. You have a way of life you have already embraced,” said Bessie Smith, now 79, who continues to use the name given to her at the former boarding school in Arizona.

“And then it’s so casually taken away,” she said. “It’s like you are violated.”

The recent discoveries of unmarked graves at government-run schools for Indigenous children in Canada — 215 graves in British Columbia, 750 more in Saskatchewan — surfaced like a long-forgotten nightmare.

But for many Indigenous people in Canada and the United States, the nightmare was never forgotten. Instead the discoveries are a reminder of how many living Native Americans were products of an experiment in forcibly removing children from their families and culture.

Many of them are still struggling to make sense of who they were and who they are.

In the century and a half that the U.S. government ran boarding schools for Native Americans, hundreds of thousands of children were housed and educated in a network of institutions, created to “civilize the savage.” By the 1920s, one group estimates, nearly 83% of Native American school-age children were attending such schools.

“When people do things to you when you’re growing up, it affects you spiritually, physically, mentally and emotionally,” said Russell Box Sr., a member of the Southern Ute tribe who was 6 when he was sent to a boarding school in southwestern Colorado.

“We couldn’t speak our language, we couldn’t sing our prayer songs,” he said. “To this day, maybe that’s why I can’t sing.”

The discovery of the bodies in Canada led Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, the first Native American to head the department that once ran the boarding schools in the United States — and herself the granddaughter of people forced to attend them — to announce that the government would search the grounds of former facilities to identify the remains of children.

That many children died in the schools on this side of the border is not in question. Just last week, nine Lakota children who perished at the federal boarding school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, were disinterred and buried in buffalo robes in a ceremony on a tribal reservation in South Dakota.

Many of the deaths of former students have been recorded in federal archives and newspaper death notices. Based on what those records indicate, the search for bodies of other students is already underway at two former schools in Colorado: Grand Junction Indian School in central Colorado, which closed in 1911, and the Fort Lewis Indian School, which closed in 1910 and reopened in Durango as Fort Lewis College.

“There were horrific things that happened at boarding schools,” said Tom Stritikus, president of Fort Lewis College. “It’s important that we daylight that.”

The idea of assimilating Native Americans through education dates back to the earliest history of the colonies.

In 1775, the Continental Congress passed a bill appropriating $500 for the education of Native American youth. By the late 1800s, the number of students in boarding schools had risen from a handful to 24,000, and the amount appropriated had soared to $2.6 million.

Throughout the decades they were in existence, the schools were seen as both a cheaper and a more expedient way of dealing with the “Indian problem.”

Carl Schurz, secretary of the interior in the late 1800s, argued that it cost close to $1 million to kill a Native American in warfare, versus just $1,200 to give his child eight years of schooling, according to the account of historian David Wallace Adams in “Education for Extinction.” “A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one,” Capt. Richard H. Pratt, founder of one of the first boarding schools, wrote in 1892. “In a sense I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: That all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him and save the man.”

Those who survived the schools described violence as routine. As punishment, Norman Lopez was made to sit in the corner for hours at the Ute Vocational School in southwestern Colorado where he was sent around age 6. When he tried to get up, a teacher picked him up and slammed him against the wall, he said. Then the teacher picked him up a second time and threw him headfirst to the ground, he said.

“I thought that it was part of school,” said Lopez, now 78. “I didn’t think of it as abusive.”

A less violent incident marked him more, he said.

His grandfather taught him how to carve a flute out of the branch of a cedar. When the boy brought the flute to school, his teacher smashed it and threw it in the trash.

He grasped even then how special the cedar flute and his native music were. “That’s what God is. God speaks through air,” he said, of the music his grandfather taught him.

He said the lesson was clear, both in the need to comply and the need to resist.

“I had to keep quiet. There’s plenty where it came from. Tree’s not going to give up,” he said of the cedar. “I’m not going to give up.”

Decades later, Lopez has returned to the flute. He carves them and records in a homemade studio, set up in his home on the Ute Mountain Ute reservation in Towaoc.

In the same boarding school, Box was punished so severely for speaking Ute that he refused to teach his children the language, in an effort to shield them the pain he endured, his ex-wife, Pearl E. Casias, said.

Years of alcoholism followed, he said. His marriage fell apart. It was not until middle age that he reached a fork in the road.

“I had been yearning in here,” he said, pointing to his heart. “My spirit had been yearning in here to stand in the lodge,” he said, referring to the medicine lodge that dancers enter during the annual Sundance, one of the most important ceremonies of the Ute people. “Then one day I said to myself, ‘Now I’m going to stand.’ And when I said that inside of me, there was a little flame.”

He went to the Sundance for the first time. He stopped drinking. This year, one of his daughters reached out to her mother, asking if she could teach her how to make beaded moccasins.

But for many, the wounds just do not heal.

Jacqueline Frost, 60, was raised by her Ute aunt, a matron at the boarding school who embraced the system and became its enforcer.

Frost said she remembered the beatings.

“I don’t know if it was a broom or a mop, I just remember the stick part, and my aunt swung it at me,” she said, adding: “There was belts. There was hangers. There was shoes. There was sticks, branches, wire.”

She, too, turned to alcohol.

“Even though I’ve gone to so much counseling,” she said, “I still would always say, ‘Why am I like this? Why do I have this ugly feeling inside me?’”

By the turn of the century, a debate had erupted on whether it was better to “carry civilization to the Indian” by building schools on tribal land. In 1902, the government completed the construction of a boarding school on the Southern Ute reservation in Ignacio — the school that Box and Lopez both attended.

The impact of the school, which was shuttered decades ago, can be summed up in two statistics: In the 1800s, when federal agents were trawling the reservation for children, they complained that there were almost no adults who spoke English. Today, about 30 people out of a tribe of fewer than 1,500 people — only 2% — speak the Ute language fluently, said Lindsay J. Box, a tribal spokeswoman. (Russell Box is her uncle).

For decades, Smith barely spoke Navajo. She thought she had forgotten it, until years later at the hospital in Denver where she worked as director of patient admissions, a Navajo couple came in with their dying baby and the language came tumbling back, she said.

It marked a turn for her. She realized that the vocabulary she thought had been beaten out of her was still there. As she looked back, she recognized the small but meaningful ways in which she had resisted.

From her first day in the dormitory, she never again practiced the morning prayer to the four directions.

Unable to do it in physical form, she learned instead to do it internally: “I did it in my heart,” she said.

In her old age, she now makes jewelry using traditional elements, like “ghost beads” made from the dried berries of the juniper tree. When she started selling online, she chose the domain: www.dzabahe.com.

It is her birth name, the one that was taken from her at the boarding school, the one whose Navajo meaning endured: “woman who fights back.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

The lawsuit, filed by the nonprofit Friends of Animals, alleges that a 2019 adoption program for wild horses is circumventing federal law that forbids the wholesale slaughter of wild horses, and that the Bureau of Land Management did not follow proper procedures when establishing the new program, which offers individuals $1,000 to adopt a wild horse but then does little to stop the new owners from selling the horses to slaughterhouses.

“It’s like sticking their head in the sand, ‘Oh we sold it to a buyer who said they would take care of them, and that’s it,’” said Michael Harris, director of the Wildlife Law Program at Friends of Animals. “…That is not what is happening; the horses are being taken down, resold and sold to the slaughterhouses.”

He pointed to a May investigation by the New York Times that found several instances in which wild horses adopted through the program were sold at slaughter auctions as soon as owners could legally do so — 12 months after the adoption.

Adopters vow not to sell the horses to slaughterhouses or middlemen, but the Bureau of Land Management does not enforce that promise, the investigation found.

Wild horses once roamed North America in the millions, but as the open range disappeared in the early 20th century, they were nearly all hunted down and turned into fertilizer and dog food. When they were finally protected in 1971, there were fewer than 20,000 left.

Once protected, though, the remnant herds started growing again — far faster than the government was prepared for.

The Bureau of Land Management estimates there are close to 100,000 wild horses in herd management areas spread across the West, with about 2,100 in Colorado. The agency views that population as unsustainable and wants to reduce the nationwide population to about 26,000 horses, and to about 800 wild horses in Colorado, according to a March 2020 report published by the agency.

Steven Hall, communications director for BLM Colorado, declined Thursday to comment on the lawsuit.

The agency is authorized to remove horses from public land — and did so with about 11,000 horses in the 2020 fiscal year — but under federal law, officials can’t slaughter the horses or enable them to be slaughtered.

The bureau has never been able to find enough people willing to adopt the untamed broncos it removes. So surplus mustangs — about 3,500 a year — have gone instead into a network of government storage pastures and corrals known as the holding system.

There are now more than 51,000 animals in holding. Bureau leaders have repeatedly proposed culling the storage herds, but they have always been blocked by lawmakers mindful that a vast majority of voters do not want symbols of their heritage turned into cuts of meat.

In 2019, the bureau instead launched the Adoption Incentive Program, which is built on the idea that paying adopters $1,000 a head is far cheaper than the $24,000 average lifetime cost of keeping a horse in government hands.

The program requires that individuals take no more than four horses a year, and adopters are not paid in full for the horses or given the title for 12 months.

The program nearly doubled the number of horses leaving the holding system, and the bureau called it “a win for all involved” that was helping “animals find homes with families who will care for and enjoy them for years to come.” The bureau’s once-sleepy adoption events were transformed.

“It became a feeding frenzy — I have never seen anything like it,” said Carol Walker, a photographer who documents the wild herds of Wyoming.

In February, she arrived at an event in Rock Springs, Wyoming, and found a line of trailers a half-mile long. When the gates opened, people rushed to sign up for adoptions without even inspecting the mustangs.

“Those people weren’t there because they cared about the horses,” Walker said in an interview with the Times. “They were there because they cared about the money.”

To be sure, tens of thousands of wild horses have been adopted over the years by people who kept and cared for them as the law intended. Some became ranch horses, some work with the Border Patrol, and one became a world champion in dressage.

Getting mustangs out of storage is critical for the bureau because its wild horse program is now in a crisis. Managers warn that the growing herds could graze public lands down to dirt, which would devastate cattle ranchers who compete for grass, and harm delicate desert landscapes and native species.

Friends of Animals maintains that the wild horse population does not need to be reduced, Harris said.

“Horses are just being pushed into smaller and smaller areas to make room for a combination of cattle and sheep, and that is the environmental problem,” Harris told The Denver Post. “…There’s simply no indication it is any more of a problem than BLM is making a problem to accommodate these political interests. There are, at best, 120,000 horses on the range in nine states covering literally millions of acres. There were at one point over a million wild horses, and their population is more stable when they are given freer range.”

The nonprofit’s lawsuit seeks to force the bureau to temporarily halt the adoption program to do a more complete analysis of the program’s impact.

I wanted to slander someone.

My colleague Kashmir Hill and I were trying to learn who is responsible for — and profiting from — the growing ecosystem of websites whose primary purpose is destroying reputations.

So I wrote a nasty post. About myself.

Then we watched as a constellation of sites duplicated my creation. To get slander removed, many people hire a “reputation management” company. In my case, it was going to cost roughly $20,000.

We soon discovered a secret, hidden behind a smoke screen of fake companies and false identities. The people facilitating slander and the self-proclaimed good guys who help remove it are often one and the same.

The stain

At first glance, the websites appear amateurish.

They have names like BadGirlReports.date, BustedCheaters.com and WorstHomeWrecker.com. Photos are badly cropped. Grammar and spelling are afterthoughts. They are clunky and text-heavy, as if they’re intended to be read by machines, not humans.

But do not underestimate their power. When someone attacks you on these so-called gripe sites, the results can be devastating. Earlier this year, we wrote about a woman in Toronto who poisoned the reputations of dozens of her perceived enemies by posting lies about them.

To assess the slander’s impact, we wrote a software program to download every post from a dozen of the most active complaint sites: more than 150,000 posts about some 47,000 people. Then we set up a web crawler that searched Google and Bing for thousands of the people who had been attacked.

For about one-third of the people, the nasty posts appeared on the first pages of their results. For more than half, the gripe sites showed up at the top of their image results.

Sometimes search engines go a step further than simply listing links; they display what they consider the most relevant phrases about whatever you’re searching for.

One woman in Ohio was the subject of so many negative posts that Bing declared in bold at the top of her search results that she “is a liar and a cheater” — the same way it states that Barack Obama was the 44th president of the United States. For roughly 500 of the 6,000 people we searched for, Google suggested adding the phrase “cheater” to a search of their names.

The unverified claims are on obscure, ridiculous-looking sites, but search engines give them a veneer of credibility. Posts from Cheaterboard.com appear in Google results alongside Facebook pages and LinkedIn profiles — or, in my case, articles in The New York Times.

That would be bad enough for people whose reputations have been savaged. But the problem is all the worse because it’s so hard to fix. And that is largely because of the secret, symbiotic relationship between those facilitating slander and those getting paid to remove it.

The spread

The posts I created featured an awkward selfie and described me as a “loser who will do anything for attention.” We posted a version of the same insult on five gripe sites. Each selfie included a unique watermark that allowed us to track it if it showed up somewhere new. For an image posted to Cheaterboard.com, for example, we hid the domain name and the date in the file code.

The posts spread quickly. Inside two hours, the Cheaterboard one had popped up on FoulSpeakers.com. Within a month, the original five posts had spawned 21 copies on 15 sites.

What was the point of copying the posts? A big clue were the ads that appeared next to them, offering help removing reputation-tarnishing content.

We contacted all of the sites that copied the original posts. Only two responded, and only one person consented to an interview: Cyrus Sullivan, who runs FoulSpeakers.com.

Sullivan, 37, of Portland, Oregon, has been in the complaint-site business since 2008, when he started STDCarriers.com. It was inspired by his own experience; in his senior year at the University of Oregon, he said, he had sex with a woman who belatedly told him that she had herpes.

“I thought there needs to be a way to warn people about something like that,” Sullivan said. STDCarriers.com let people anonymously post unverified information about people who they said had sexually transmitted diseases.

Sullivan said he hadn’t made much money until 2012, when STDCarriers.com attracted national media attention. Anderson Cooper had a daytime talk show at the time, and he did a segment dressing down Sullivan and others who ran complaint sites. Sullivan’s web traffic soared, and posts soon flooded the site.

After a couple of stints in jail — among other things, he was convicted of sending death threats to a woman and of throwing Sriracha Doritos into the face of police officers, “using the spicy dust as a weapon, like pepper spray,” according to a court filing — he started FoulSpeakers.com in 2018. It billed itself as “a foul speech search engine and web archive” that captured awful things written about people on other sites, such as my post on Cheaterboard.com.

Sullivan told us that copying content was a great way to lure people to his sites. (He said he didn’t feel bad about spreading unverified slander. “Teach children not to talk to strangers, then teach them not to believe what they read on the internet,” he said.)

But there was a financial incentive as well. Sullivan had started a reputation-management service to help people get “undesirable information” about themselves removed from their search engine results. The “gold package” cost $699.99. For those customers, Sullivan would alter the computer code underlying the offending posts, instructing search engines to ignore them.

The safecracker

Some reputation-management firms use adversarial tactics to get posts taken down. But cozier relationships are the norm.

For example, ads for 247Removal.com appear on a dozen prominent gripe websites, and were attached to some of the posts about me. 247Removal’s owner is Heidi Glosser, 38. She said she didn’t know how her ads had ended up on those sites.

Glosser charges $750 or more per post removal, which adds up to thousands of dollars for most of her clients. To get posts removed, she said, she often pays an “administrative fee” to the gripe site’s webmaster. We asked her whether this was extortion. “I can’t really give you a direct answer,” she said.

On the first page of Glosser’s own Google search results is a link to a court ruling related to her 2003 conviction for burglary and safecracking. “It’s not related to me,” she said. She urged us to do a background check on her, which confirmed her involvement.

Glosser said she had decided to try to help people improve their online reputations in 2018, after she watched an 11-minute documentary about revenge porn. The film focused on Scott Breitenstein, a former plumber who ran sites hosting nude photos of people posted without their consent.

Sites controlled by Breitenstein also were venues for unverified allegations about cheaters, scams, predators, deadbeats and “potential johns.” After the documentary came out, Breitenstein told business partners that he had sold his websites. He didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Glosser said her goal was to assist victims of Breitenstein and his ilk.

Glosser used to live near Breitenstein in Dayton, Ohio. She said that was a coincidence. “Dayton is not as small as everyone thinks it is,” she said. She said she doesn’t know Breitenstein.

Why, then, were Glosser and her deceased wife friendly with members of the Breitenstein family on Facebook?

Glosser wouldn’t say.

An unlikely signature

We noticed that the same ad kept appearing on the proliferating posts about me being a loser. It was a simple text ad for something called RepZe.com: “Remove Cheaters Sites Contents.”

Most sidebar ads are programmatic. That means they are served up by an ad network with no involvement by the people who run a site, and they change every time you visit. That wasn’t the case here. The RepZe ads were permanent fixtures, written into the websites’ coding.

When Kashmir called RepZe, a woman identifying herself as Sofia refused to answer questions and said to email the company instead. Nobody responded to the emails.

When I reached out to RepZe via a form on its site to ask about removing one of the posts about me, Sofia called me. She said that for $1,500 the post would be removed within 24 hours. The removal would come with a “lifetime guarantee,” she said.

She encouraged me to act quickly. “I don’t want to scare you, but these posts can spread,” she warned.

At this point, we figured that when someone paid a company like RepZe to get a post removed, RepZe then paid the complaint site to delete it. But our understanding turned out to be incomplete at best.

RepZe claims to be based in a Denver suburb. But the company isn’t registered for business in Colorado. The address on its website belongs to Anytime Mailbox, which charges $9.99 per month to create the appearance of an office, accepting mail on someone’s behalf and then scanning and emailing it to the client. (Anytime’s CEO, Matt Going, said he couldn’t answer questions about RepZe, except to say it was no longer a customer.)

The three people listed as RepZe employees have scant online presences and do not seem to exist. One page on the website includes a message from RepZe’s CEO, identified as “Mr. M. Moore.” At the bottom of the message is what appears to be his signature. Upon closer inspection, it is Marilyn Monroe’s autograph.

RepZe has promotional videos on YouTube. The people in the videos, including those who claimed to be employees or customers, are paid actors. (We identified them on a freelancing site, Fiverr, where they charged as little as $25 to appear in videos.)

We tracked down actual customers of RepZe. All relayed the same basic story. They had hired the company to remove negative posts about them, which it quickly did. But then RepZe would threaten that, absent swift payment of the thousands of dollars the customers had agreed to pay, the posts would reappear and multiply.

“The content will be restored,” a RepZe representative wrote in a text to one customer, who posted screenshots of the exchange on Facebook. “We are trying to help. You are trying to piss my ass off.”

Then, months later, the posts would reappear.

One disgruntled customer created RepZeFraud.com under the pseudonym Greg Saint. He said he had paid RepZe $4,000 in 2019 to remove two negative posts. Months later, he said, copies of the posts began reappearing online, and he suspected RepZe was responsible. He created RepZeFraud.com to expose the person he thought was really behind the service: a 28-year-old web developer in India, Vikram Parmar.

A clue in the metadata

We had first heard Parmar’s name months earlier, from a California software developer, Aaron Greenspan.

Greenspan runs PlainSite.org, which posts court documents and thus makes people’s criminal records easier to find. He said one of those people, a convicted murderer, had tried to destroy his and his family’s online reputations.

Greenspan could have paid to get the posts removed, but he didn’t like the idea of ransom. Instead, he set out to unmask whoever was behind the sites and the reputation-management companies. This was easier said than done.

“You don’t know where it is, who runs it, who hosts it,” he said. “That’s how they evade any accountability.”

The websites use what are known as privacy proxy services to hide who owns them and where they’re hosted. Greenspan combed through digital clues and tracked down lawsuits involving the sites — which he began cataloging on PlainSite — to map out the industry. He concluded that many sites appeared to be owned by a small handful of people. Every time he got in touch with one of them, that person would point him to other people and say they were the true bad actors.

Greenspan got in touch with RepZe, which had ads next to many of the posts attacking him. He pretended to be an interested customer. RepZe gave him a quote of $14,800 to remove 17 posts. The company sent a contract. Greenspan looked at the document’s metadata and found “Vikram Parmar” listed as the author.

A quick Google search revealed that Parmar faced criminal charges. In 2014, he had created a fake website that charged people money to apply for nonexistent jobs with India’s Central Bureau of Investigation. Prosecutors in New Delhi charged him and a collaborator with criminal conspiracy. (Parmar claimed that an “unscrupulous client” had hired him to create what he thought was a legitimate website. The case is pending.)

Greenspan sent Parmar a message on Skype in September 2019. They began to chat. (Greenspan showed us screenshots of the chats.) He demanded that Parmar delete posts about him for free. Parmar removed one, on DirtyScam.com, and then their conversation became friendlier.

Parmar complained to Greenspan about the greediness of the owners of other complaint sites. One of them was a guy in Ohio named Scott Breitenstein, who Parmar said owned hundreds of sites that stole original content from “legitimate” ones.

Parmar told Greenspan that he’d had to pay Breitenstein to get copycat posts taken down. He said Breitenstein had instructed him to send checks to another person. Her name was Heidi Glosser.

“One of the Gentlemen”

We reached Parmar via Skype in February. He was on vacation in the Indian seaside town of Goa. We said we were working on an article about the reputation-management industry. He denied involvement, saying he was “a real estate builder and also working on some government projects.”

Then we laid out what we knew.

We had linked Parmar not just to RepZe but also to another cleanup service, RemoveReports.com. In addition, we had found that he was involved with ReportCheater.com, WebActivism.com, WtfCheater.com, RealtorScam.com and DirtyScam.com. All were listed by RepZe or RemoveReports as places from which they could remove content.

At least one of the sites had been registered under Parmar’s name. Others were linked to him in different ways. Some have the same Google ad account; some share IP addresses; some had been registered to Parmar’s email address.

In other words, Parmar seemed to be running sites that produced slander and running sites that made money by removing that slander.

Parmar sounded uneasy. He said anyone could use anyone else’s email address to register a site. Then he admitted to doing some reputation-management work. Then he asked that his name not be used in this article. Then he suggested other people in the industry whom we should investigate instead of him. (The list included Breitenstein and Glosser.)

“You are pretty much accurate but targeting a wrong guy,” he wrote in a Skype message. “I am just mediator,” he added. “I am one of the gentleman.”

Parmar resurfaced in April, about 20 minutes after we emailed RepZe seeking comment for this article. In messages over Skype, he said he didn’t own the complaint sites but was providing them services, including helping them improve their performance on search engines.

Why were his email address and Google ad accounts linked to the complaint sites? Parmar didn’t have a coherent explanation.

My experiment ends

Three months after my experiment started, my search results were suffering the consequences. Bing helpfully recommended adding “loser” to a search for “Aaron Krolik.” When you Googled my name, Cheaters.news was at the top of the image results.

There’s no way for me to delete the posts that I wrote; the slander sites don’t allow that. Based on estimates provided by removal services, it would cost me about $20,000 to get the posts taken down — and even then, more posts might appear in their place.

There is another way to lessen the posts’ impact. In certain circumstances, Google will remove harmful content from individuals’ search results, including links to “sites with exploitative removal practices.” If a site charges to remove posts, you can ask Google not to list it.

Google didn’t advertise this policy widely, and few victims of online slander seem aware that it’s an option. That’s in part because when you Google ways to clean up your search results, Google’s solution is buried under ads for reputation-management services like RepZe.

I eventually found the Google form. I submitted a claim to have one URL removed. “Your email has been sent to our team,” Google told me.

Three days later, I received an email from Google saying the URL would be removed from my search results. Later that day, it was gone. I submitted the 25 other links. They were removed, too, but images from gripe sites kept reappearing in my search results.

Other people who have used Google’s form reported similar experiences: It mostly works, but is less effective for images. And if you have an attacker who won’t stop writing posts about you, it’s almost useless. The slander remains.

Parmar, a self-described expert in how to influence search results, has recently taken steps to burnish his own reputation. Around the time that we started trying to reach him, articles began appearing online casting him in glowing terms.

One piece gushed about his “rags-to-riches story.” Another, on Freelancer.com, said his web-marketing business generated $2 million a year in revenue. Parmar was quoted as saying he had bought cars for himself and his family.

“I live like a BOSS,” he said.