The cause was cancer, said Rhoades Alderson, a family spokesperson.

Johnson came from one of the country’s richest families but struggled for years to find his niche in life. He tried working in his family’s business, which makes Band-Aids, Tylenol and countless other products, before discovering his vocation through art.

“It all started when my uncle fired me,” Johnson told the Star-Ledger newspaper in Newark in 2000. “I’m dyslexic, you know, and there I was, with no university degree, as they say, no where, no way. I had absolutely no idea what to do with myself.”

In the late 1960s, he began to focus his energies on sculpture, making hyper-realistic bronze statues, often of enormous scale, that invited people to interact with them. Taxi drivers have been known to stop outside the Four Seasons Hotel in Georgetown, the site of one of Johnson’s sculptures of a man hailing a taxi.

Others portray people reading or talking on park benches or are three-dimensional representations of famous works of art, including scenes from impressionist paintings and the photograph of Marilyn Monroe’s white dress being blown above her knees.

“No one knows his name, but everyone knows his sculptures,” David Levy, the onetime director of Washington’s old Corcoran Gallery of Art, told the Chicago Tribune in 2003.

Several of Johnson’s works, including portrayals of a skateboarder, a police officer and a woman sketching, have been installed in Washington. One of his best-known pieces, “The Awakening,” is now at the National Harbor in Prince George’s County. It consists of a gigantic head, arm, hand, knee and foot emerging from the earth. Children often climb on the colossal work.

“Public art has to be accessible,” Johnson said in a video made for a 2019 exhibition of his work in Nantucket, Massachusetts. “It also civilizes an area – it ‘peoplizes’ it, it makes it inviting to the human being . . . It’s all interaction, it’s ‘please touch.’ ”

Johnson created hundreds of sculptures, yet for many years he was considered a dabbler, a purveyor of kitsch, a rich dilettante who was scorned by critics and the art establishment. He did not have an exhibition in a museum until 2003, when the Corcoran Gallery presented “Beyond the Frame,” Johnson’s sculptural tableaus based on paintings by Edouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Vincent van Gogh and other impressionist masters.

“Let’s not mince words: This show is really, really bad,” Washington Post art critic Blake Gopnik wrote. “I can assert with a fair degree of certainty: This is the worst museum exhibition I’ve ever seen.”

Other artists, such as George Segal, Duane Hanson and Jeff Koons, had earned critical praise for their realistic, life-size sculptures, but Johnson was lambasted for being derivative and unoriginal, for having poor technique and “no imaginative component that I can see,” as Time magazine critic Robert Hughes put it.

Johnson took the critical brickbats in stride and kept on working. Near his studio in New Jersey, he established the Seward Johnson Atelier, consisting of a school for sculptors and one of the world’s leading foundries for casting large-scale works in bronze.

He converted the onetime site of the state fair in Hamilton, New Jersey, into the Grounds for Sculpture, now consisting of 42 acres of outdoor artworks. He exhibited his own sculptures along with those of such acclaimed artists as Segal, Beverly Pepper and Red Grooms.

“Seward is the artist that everybody loves to hate,” Corcoran director David Levy told the New York Times in 2002. “But quietly and selflessly, he is an enormously important citizen of art. He’s above and beyond patronage. The atelier and Grounds for Sculpture are grand contributions.”

Some of Johnson’s work has acquired a deeper and more lasting meaning than even he could have imagined. In 1982, he created a sculpture, “Double Check,” depicting a businessman looking in his briefcase, which was installed near the World Trade Center in New York.

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, an estimated $100 million worth of art near the World Trade Center was destroyed. Johnson’s “Double Check” survived intact. Firefighters arriving at the scene tried to rescue the seated businessman, covered in debris, before realizing he was made of bronze.

The sculpture became an impromptu memorial, adorned with flowers, balloons and personal notes. It was a symbol not only of the workers who lost their lives that day, but also of a spirit of determination to keep forging ahead through the sorrow.

“Double Check” was reinstalled near the site of the World Trade Center in 2006, still bearing the gouges and scars of 9/11.

“I thought of him as a businessman Everyman – with his briefcase – getting ready for his next appointment,” Johnson told the Times in 2005, “and people identified with him. So when he survived, it was as if he was one of them – surviving as well.”

John Seward Johnson Jr. was born April 16, 1930, in New Brunswick, New Jersey. His father was on the board of directors of Johnson & Johnson, which was founded in 1886 by three brothers. His mother, a homemaker, was from Bermuda.

In 1932, not long after the young son of aviator Charles Lindbergh was kidnapped and killed, someone tried to break into the Johnson family mansion, presumably in an attempt to kidnap the 2-year-old Johnson or his younger sister.

“My father shot the man in the leg, and he fell off his ladder,” Johnson told the Times in 2002. “He was arrested later. But my father became obsessed about security.”

Johnson grew up mostly in New Jersey and attended a private school in Connecticut and the University of Maine before serving in the Navy during and after the Korean War. He spent several years working for Johnson & Johnson before being fired in 1962 by his uncle.

After a tumultuous early marriage to Barbara Kline ended in divorce, Johnson married writer Cecelia Joyce Horton in 1964. They began painting together, and she suggested that he take up sculpture because of his mechanical aptitude. His first effort, a nude in a fetal position, won an international award.

“I haven’t won a prize since, but I knew what I wanted to do,” Johnson told the Star-Ledger in 2000. He went on to sell tens of millions of dollars worth of sculptures, with individual works going for as much as $500,000. In time, some critics were even won over, and his work can be found in private collections and museums all over the world.

“In the corporate world, I wasn’t having fun,” he said in 2010. “In the world I chose for these last many decades, I am. And what’s life without fun?”

In 1971, Johnson’s 76-year-old father married his former maid, a 34-year-old Polish immigrant named Barbara “Basia” Piasecka. Weeks before the elder Johnson’s death in 1983, he revised his will to leave his entire fortune, worth an estimated $400 million to $600 million, to his wife. His six children were omitted.

As the eldest child, Johnson led a long court fight to contest the inheritance.

“When Basia was asked to come and clean house,” he said in 1985, “she took it idiomatically instead of literally.”

After three years and $25 million in legal fees, each of the six Johnson children was awarded $6 million, with millions more going to a family-founded oceanographic institute in Florida, which had also been excluded from the will.

Basia Johnson ended up as one of the richest women in the world. She died in Poland in 2013.

In a separate court case resolved in 2001, Johnson’s daughter from his first marriage, Jenny Anne “Cookie” Johnson, successfully sued to receive a portion of a multimillion-dollar family trust.

Johnson’s survivors include his wife of 55 years, Cecelia Joyce Johnson; their two children, John Seward Johnson III, a founder of the BuzzFeed media website, and India Blake, a poet and photographer; two sisters; a half sister and half brother; and five grandchildren.

Johnson, whose primary home was in Hopewell, New Jersey, continued to make artworks until shortly before his death. The Grounds for Sculpture has become a pilgrimage site for art lovers, and Johnson often led singalongs at a nearby restaurant.

One of his more playful works, which he created near his studio, was a three-dimensional replica of van Gogh’s 1889 painting “The Bedroom.” It came outfitted with a bed and a drawer that contained Johnson’s tap-dancing shoes.

“I take naps in here sometimes,” he told the Times in 2002. “Once, when I woke up, I had so much energy I put on my shoes and danced. I’m living in my own dream, you see.”

This isn’t my first outbreak: Seventeen years ago, I self-quarantined in my Hong Kong apartment for three weeks to avoid the epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS.

My work-from-home beard is the same. But this time, the Internet has changed everything else.

From my couch, I can have a face-to-face with my boss, who commented on the beard. Just using my phone, I can brainstorm with co-workers. Or get lunch delivered. Or have groceries dropped at my door. Or check out a book from the library. Or join a (virtual) happy hour. Or watch pretty much any movie.

It’s a Netflix-and-quarantine life. But it’s not particularly chill.

My San Francisco self-quarantine is an experiment to see how far an app-operated life can stretch. The experience is easy, but it hasn’t put me at ease. Video conferencing fails 50 percent of the time. The online tools I’m using – Slack, Microsoft Office, Dropbox – treat work as paramount, so it never really goes away. I’m paying double for food delivered by apps. My Apple Watch, which tracks physical activity, beeped with a message: Geoff, you can do better. I turn on my Apple TV, and the outbreak is there, too, pitching “Contagion,” the trending movie about dying from a disease spread in part by touching your face. (I indulged the paranoia.)

Then there was the morning my broadband went out.

Quarantine might not seem like a big sacrifice, but my experience shows it’s no snow day. It lays bare the vulnerabilities – and the vulnerable – in our online-everything economy.

My online cloister is nowhere close to the nightmare facing the people under medical orders to quarantine or isolate in hotels, nursing homes and cruise ships. To limit the spread of the disease, Microsoft, Twitter and other companies told their employees in early March to start working from home. I followed their lead and self-quarantined to see how it might feel different with all of today’s tech. On Tuesday, The Washington Post encouraged employees all over the United States to start working from home if they could.

Even before the coronavirus, there was a name for the Internet’s on-demand economy: hermit tech. Or sometimes, assisted living for millennials. “You already live in quarantine,” wrote Georgia Institute of Technology professor Ian Bogost last week about apps ranging from Netflix and Instagram to DoorDash and Amazon Prime Now that help people practice the “social distancing” being recommended by some health authorities. (Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

There’s not a huge difference between living in a millennial bubble and being cloistered. Over the past week, growth in the use of grocery-delivery service Instacart has surged by 10 times in California and Washington and by 20 times in New York, says spokeswoman Natalia Montalvo. On Instacart, searches for hand sanitizer increased by 23 times.

Now this tech has a more urgent purpose than the luxury of convenience. It makes staying at home possible (and much more palatable) to people who can afford it. For the fortunate, work, shopping and even school can be rerouted through the Internet. But it also bakes in tech-industry assumptions about work happening behind a keyboard, not to mention access to resources and how we interact with others. These apps were designed by engineers with efficiency as the No. 1 goal.

My hermit-tech lifestyle is extreme for the United States because I’m also avoiding leaving my house. But it’s not that far off from the new reality elsewhere, now including parts of New York state. In some Chinese cities, people have been in quarantine for over a month and online services are even more advanced. My favorite example: In locked-down Wuhan, teachers use an app called DingTalk to remotely assign homework. So thousands of kids gave it one-star reviews in hopes it would get booted from the App Store.

Depending on the speed covid-19 spreads here, I could be on the leading edge of a great American self-quarantine. That would test many aspects of our government, economy and – closer at hand – personal technology. So it’s time to ask: Is the home WiFi ready? And just how much power are we handing over to Silicon Valley’s values?

During SARS, when I also worked as a newspaper reporter, I had Internet access in my apartment. But in 2003, working meant going into the office. Texting still required repeatedly tapping on my phone’s numerical keypad.

Most of my remote work got done over email. In the month of April 2003 alone, I sent and received over 1,100 emails that contained the word SARS. (I kept the archives.) Going through my inbox required logging into a secure PC.

This time, working from home felt pretty unremarkable . . . at first. I often take calls from home at odd hours, or stay home for a day jamming on a project. Some 43 percent of Americans work from home at least some, according to a 2017 Gallup poll.

I knew my WiFi would hold. I’d previously invested in a mesh router (I recommend Eero). And I was already plugged into work with cloud-connected office tech that I can access on my office laptop, personal iMac, smartphone and tablet, too. I signed up for more Slack messaging channels, so I could better track what everyone was doing.

Not all of it worked as advertised. I know video conferencing has major devotees, but in my experience it has worked about half of the time. My smart Post colleagues dig up amazing scoops but are continually befuddled by Cisco Webex. For some meetings with far-flung people, I’m the only one on video because nobody else could make it work.

Then, at 8:45 a.m. on my third day at home, I had a real jolt: My Internet went down. My heart raced as I ran around the house trying to figure out what happened. I blame my Internet service provider Comcast, though it tells me there were no major outages in my area. The problem fixed itself, but uh-oh: What’s going to happen when networks designed for home use suddenly get stressed by millions? Even when you pay extra for faster downloads, with many residential broadband services you are still sharing a limited resource with all your neighbors.

As the days tick by, I’ve noticed a bigger problem. Without any boundaries between work and life, I just keep working. No screen is an escape. Why, oh why, did I sign up for all those Slack channels? The software just keeps sending me a mountain of information; it doesn’t care if I’m actually processing it. I’m part of the problem. I feel guilty WFH, and sending Slack messages at all hours lets me show what a good colleague I am!

There is no technology to replace the intel you get in an office: that someone is on a call, having a bad day, or at home taking care of a sick kid. I can only imagine how these frustrations multiply if you also have kids on coronavirus leave from school bouncing around the house.

Friends and colleagues who work remotely on a regular basis advise a few things no office app is going to do for you: Use a separate, dedicated work device. Have a dedicated work wardrobe – at least different WFH pajamas and sleep pajamas, as Vice noted. And most of all, have clear remote work hours that end with a daily ritual like working out. Or a stiff cocktail.

During my 2003 confinement, I ate canned soup, frozen dumplings and peanut butter. So much peanut butter.

That’s what I had in my supplies, which I didn’t venture out to replenish very often, both to respect my boss’s marching orders and, to be honest, because I was terrified. During those weeks when the mechanics of SARS remained a mystery, the safe bet was not to trust anyone. There was no Prime, no same-day delivery. If you wanted something, you had to wait a week or put on a mask and go find a store selling it.

Fast forward and my coronavirus self-quarantine has been delicious. I can choose from thousands of restaurants from delivery apps that bring the food right to my door.

But it hasn’t been cheap. On my first day at home, a $10.78 Impossible Whopper meal from Burger King ran me a whopping $24.46 through Uber Eats.

One time, I asked the DoorDash driver bringing me Thai takeout if he worried about being out interacting with so many people. His was a tale of two Silicon Valleys: He’s doing on-demand work for apps, while his girlfriend, who works for a tech company, has been ordered to work from home indefinitely. “I’ve got cars and stuff I’ve got to pay for. So I have to go out and get it,” said the driver, who asked not to be named.

“Maybe I’m a little less afraid of it than other people are,” he said. “But I know that my immune system is like every other person.”

As my colleague Nitasha Tiku has written, the on-demand economy conditions us to not think about why these services are affordable. Gig workers typically don’t get paid sick leave or masks and sanitizer as they run around town, though on Monday Instacart and DoorDash announced new sick pay policies for in-store shoppers.

Both DoorDash and Instacart also began promoting “contactless” deliveries – an option for people who order online to say “leave it at my door.” To borrow a favorite techie phrase, it’s social distancing “as a service.”

I lost it around day three during SARS. That’s when I emailed my work friend Karen: “I’m getting worried that this is messing with me psychologically. I tried to go to the grocery store about an hour ago, but couldn’t make it out the door. I sat down and ate peanut butter instead.”

My entertainment options included a small collection of DVDs, terrestrial TV, books and telephone calls. Some friends passed the hours with the help of an Xbox, but I didn’t have one.

This time around, I lost it around day five. There’s certainly a lot more to keep me entertained: I eat lunch with Twitter, tracking the infected cruise ship docking a few miles away in Oakland. There’s a growing list of streaming services that each want $8 to $35 per month to keep me entertained: Apple TV Plus, CBS, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Sling TV and Netflix. By my rough estimate, I’ve streamed at least 30 hours of TV over eight days.

I checked out an e-book from the library for my book club but can’t seem to find the focus to finish it. I’ve also become a sloth: Normally, I walk 3.9 miles per day, according to my Apple Watch. In the past week, I’ve averaged less than one mile per day.

A group of tech workers and journalists working at home experimented with a form of virtual socializing on Monday: A 5:00 #WFHHappyHour streamed over Zoom video. Sadly, when I joined few participants seemed to actually have cocktails.

I hit peak anxiety on Saturday night when I sat on my couch with a plate of cookies and streamed the 2011 thriller “Contagion.” The Apple TV movie store recommended it to me and, apparently, lots and lots of other Americans, because it’s currently the second most popular film in the Warner Bros. catalog, up from 270th last year.

Well, if I wasn’t freaked out before, I sure am now. In the film, a disease spreads much like the coronavirus, with health officials reminding people to wash their hands and not touch their faces . . . until it kills off millions and millions of people.

Shortly after I finished the movie, there was a knock at the door. It was my groceries from Instacart. I brought them inside and felt compelled to wipe them all down with antiseptic wipes.

Perhaps I need to try meditating. There are apps for that, too.

“As many as 140,000 people work for my companies, and I am responsible for them. I need to think about how to make the system stable when inherited,” Mordashov, a father of six and Russia’s fifth-richest person, said in an interview near Moscow.

Mordashov, 54, said he’s developing a plan for the wealth transfer, while helping his children prepare for the responsibility. He’s one of dozens of tycoons including Vladimir Potanin, Suleiman Kerimov and Leonid Fedun who got enormously rich in post-Soviet Russia now intensifying efforts to figure out what to do with their fortunes.

Their children, frequently entering adulthood, are among the first to gain power and money by inheritance after the communist regime’s collapse. It’s a process that will have profound ramifications for the country’s economy and politics.

Some businesses employ hundreds of thousands of people, their leaders are frequently close allies of President Vladimir Putin and there’s more than $270 billion at stake for just 23 people on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

“Russia is practically the only country in the world where there have been no precedents for the transfer of large fortunes by inheritance for almost a hundred years,” said Andrey Shpak, head of research at the Wealth Transformation Center at Skolkovo Moscow School of Management.

Mordashov made his fortune through investments in steelmaker Severstal PJSC. He later diversified to gold, power equipment and now has stakes in media assets, a mobile carrier, tourist companies and a supermarket chain.

Mordashov said he is considering a fund “with a certain model of management, that will allow my children to participate,” he said, without elaborating.

Last year, he started transferring holdings to his sons Kirill, 20, and Nikita, 19. They got a 65% stake in gold producer Nordgold valued at $780 million and two-thirds of the stake in TUI worth about $730 million.

The brothers haven’t started managing the assets as they are still students in Moscow, according to Mordashov. He said they probably won’t start their careers working within his companies. They need to experience real life working for others as nepotism creates business challenges, Mordashov added.

There is no ideal form of wealth structure, said Shpak, whose center consults with wealthy families. How assets are transferred will depend partly on where they’re held and relations within a family.

Interest in international trusts has declined, in part because of stricter regulatory requirements in foreign jurisdictions, he said.

Some tycoons are taking a radically different approach.

Vladimir Potanin, Russia’s richest person and a father of five, signed Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge initiative in 2013, promising at least half of his wealth to philanthropic causes.

“I do not think that to give such a huge fortune to children would be the right decision,” Potanin said in an interview near Moscow. “This will just ruin their life.”

Billionaire Mikhail Fridman also plans to give his wealth to charity, he said in an interview. His son Alexander rents a two-room flat on the outskirts of Moscow for $500 a month and started his own business after finishing studying in the U.K. last year.

Regardless of what they do, Shpak urges the tycoons to make their decisions quickly.

“The lack of a clear succession plan and targeted training of the heirs increases the risk that a considerable part of Russian fortunes may be actually lost over time,” he said. That may be because of hereditary disputes, corporate conflicts or a lack of capital management skills from heirs, he added.

If they don’t pay attention, Russia may see some “drama in the richest families.”

The annual Bloomberg analysis has measured factors such as labor-force participation, education, political representation, health care and corporate leadership since 2016. Even with gains, only a handful of states scored better than 80 points on the 0 to 100 scale, the data showed. Democrat-controlled states were best for women, and Republican states were the worst.

“Looking at states that are doing well across the board, women are doing better,” said Nicole Mason, CEO of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. “They have higher earnings, there are more women represented in the state legislature, and there are more women in positions of power.”

The latest index was released ahead of International Women’s Day on March 8.

At the recent rate of gains, however, gender parity would take many more decades. The institute released data on Thursday estimating that at current rates of improvement, women won’t gain parity in Congress until 2108. Women, who make up about half the workforce and half the population, hold about a quarter of management jobs and only about 5% of CEO jobs. The pay gap has been steady for more than a decade, with women earning about 80 cents for every dollar a man makes.

“‘Glacial’ is the right word to use when we think about women’s progress in the U.S,” Mason said.

In aggregate, many factors measured in the survey are improving. Only about 14% of women lived in poverty in the U.S. in the 2020 index compared with 17% in 2016. Women held 29% of state legislature seats in 2019, compared to 24% in 2015. A third of women 25 and older had at least a bachelor’s degree versus 30% in the 2016 ranking.

Vermont, the home state of Sen. Bernie Sanders who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, is a bright spot for most of those measures.

The state ranked No. 1 for the fourth straight year in the basic equality measure comprising gender pay ratio, labor-force participation and college-degree attainment by women, as well as share of women in poverty and lacking health coverage.

More than 80% of female Vermonters — among those ages 20-64 — are working and typically earned 82 cents for every dollar earned by male counterparts. Only 3% are without health coverage, among three best states for coverage. In the U.S. overall, 8% of women lack health care, the data showed.

The states with the biggest improvement in their rankings during the last five years were New York, Pennsylvania and Washington. South Dakota slipped 11 spots in that time frame, the biggest decline.

In Massachusetts, only 2% of women still lacked health insurance, compared with 17% in Texas, the state with the least amount of coverage for women. New Hampshire, with 8.4% of women in poverty, was the best by that measure. Missouri, Louisiana and New Mexico trailed the nation with at least one in five women in poverty.

Maryland led the U.S. for the fifth straight year for female leadership, factoring in business ownership, graduate-degree attainment by women, share of highly-compensated females, and percentage of state legislative bodies and board rooms of sizable public firms represented by women.

With poorest and least educated Americans the least able to move, the reality of where you are born can have a dramatic effect on your opportunities.

Almost 45% of women in Hawaii are business owners, compared with less than 30% in North Dakota. About a third of the total full-time workers earning six-figure compensation are female in Maryland and New York, according to a Bloomberg analysis of 2018 Census data. That contrasts with just 18% women in North and South Dakota, the lowest U.S. rate.

Women in Hawaii improved to 31% from 28% in share of those making six-figures paychecks — the biggest one-year gain.

“There’s not enough public will for us to really think through what’s causing these gaps and these disparities,” Mason said. “In a recent poll, 82% of people surveyed said that they believe in women’s equality and that a woman can be president and women should earn the same as men. There’s a real gap between what people philosophically believe in, at a high level, and what’s actually happening on the ground.”

Lagarde’s leadership contrasts with the all-male eurosystem of national central bank governors, a report from the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum said Thursday.

While Europe is the best-performing region when it comes to diversity of central banks, only 14 institutions are female-led across the globe, representing less than a third of the global economy.

Some recent efforts to appointment women to senior central banking positions have fallen flat. While the U.K. government worked with diversity specialists to replace Governor Mark Carney, only two women applied and the role went to Andrew Bailey.

In Ireland, deputy governor Sharon Donnery was “overlooked” for promotion to the top post upon Philip Lane’s move to the ECB, the report said. The role went to Gabriel Makhlouf instead.

“Perhaps the selection process needs to change,” said Danae Kyriakopoulou, chief economist and director of research at OMFIF. “It is legitimate to remind recruiters that a central bank is a team, and that they are not just picking the best individuals, taken one by one in isolation, but the best combination of minds.”

Overall, OMFIF’s gender balance index improved to 28% in 2020 from 25% a year earlier, the think-tank said, with a score of 100% representing perfect balance between women and men. The improvement reflects progression within senior positions, as well as the appointment of more women to deputy governor positions.

Spain topped the index, followed by Aruba, Iceland and Malaysia, the think-tank said. The Asia Pacific score improved the most. Canada may soon be joining the ranks of a central bank with a female chief, with Senior Deputy Governor Carolyn Wilkins one of the favorites to take the top job later this year.

The inclusion of previously underrepresented groups in leadership can encourage competition and help ensure a range of views inform policy making. That’s important for central banks “in light of their social duty to resemble the society they serve,” the report said.

One-fifth of central banks have no women in senior positions or on monetary policy committees, and more than half of those are in the Middle East and Asia Pacific.

“Action is needed to correct opportunity asymmetries and level the playing field, and create more inclusive and supportive work environments,” the report said. “Things will not change without modern, progressive policies.”

Alison Reynolds, 46, raised about $1 million – more than twice her original goal – from businesses, friends, family, and other supporters to fund research for phenylketonuria, often referred to as PKU, a metabolic condition afflicting her 17-year-old daughter. She started her ski adventure Feb. 21 and returned home to Washington on Monday.

She and a Norwegian ski guide skied almost 15 miles each day near the border with Sweden. They each pulled an 80-pound sled containing water, food and equipment, sleeping in a tent most nights. Reynolds said her guide told her she was in good shape for the adventure.

Reynolds, a mother of four who trained for more than a year, said the adventure was “amazing” but admitted she was tired. She said dozens of letters and cards were waiting when she got home, while many well-wishers said their church or school had prayed for her or lit a candle each day she skied.

“I was thrilled that so many people were touched by our story,” she said. “I owe a huge amount of gratitude to friends and perfect strangers. People are fundamentally good.”

Reynolds’ daughter Tia has had PKU since birth. A person with the condition has a damaged enzyme that breaks down an amino acid called phenylalanine, or Phe, which is found in protein and many foods.

Without that enzyme to process Phe, PKU patients can have a dangerous buildup in the bloodstream if they eat foods with high levels of protein, such as milk, nuts, pasta and cheese. Typically, a PKU patient can consume six to seven grams of protein a day, compared with other adults, who can consume at least 50 to 60 grams daily. High Phe levels in a person with PKU can lead to brain damage.

Tia has used a drug called Palynziq since last fall to treat her PKU, injecting it daily into her stomach. It lowers her Phe levels and has led Tia to a less restrictive diet.

Reynolds decided to ski across Norway to raise awareness for the disorder after years of raising money through more traditional fundraisers and galas. She chose Norway to pay tribute to the Norwegian biochemist who discovered and named PKU.

Reynolds said the trip didn’t always go as she expected. Her journey to the backcountry was delayed after an avalanche hit the tracks in front of her train, causing a 17-hour delay with little food and water. The pair then battled heavier-than-expected snow, wind gusts of 40 mph and shivering cold.

It took two hours for the pair to set up their camp each night after a day on skis. They ate oatmeal and freeze-dried food. She slept in three wool shirts, two pairs of pants, a hat, gloves and multiple jackets.

“It required intense focus, and staying warm was the biggest challenge,” Reynolds said. “Sometimes you were just kicking your legs together to stay warm.”

Reynolds said she didn’t have as much time to reflect on her family’s dealings with PKU as she had hoped, as her surroundings while skiing commanded constant attention.

For two nights, because of the heavy snow and high winds, they stayed in a cabin that had no heat. After one of her jackets blew away in the first few days, she used a special jacket she brought along – the same one her mother wore when she skied to the North Pole 20 years earlier.

“My lowest points were early on,” Reynolds said. “I thought the weather was going to make it not doable. But I knew we had to get through it.”

Reynolds and her guide skied as many miles as they had planned but sometimes at a slower rate because of the weather, leaving no days for rest.

The two chatted while skiing or in the tent about food, American culture and politics, and the warm places Reynolds wanted to visit after leaving Norway. Tia was among her family members and friends who met her as the trek ended. Reynolds said her daughter became emotional as her mother crossed the finish line.

There are no cold-weather trips in her future, Reynolds said. She plans to focus on her family and visit someplace warm with them in the spring.

On the final day of her journey, she wrote on her blog that she had crossed the finish line, but “the real winners are everyone with PKU.”

Though his parents objected to the decision to relinquish the property to developers, the extended family went ahead, selling off most of the 220 acres piecemeal starting in 1998. Roswell, then only 7 years old, showed his displeasure by shoving rocks into the tailpipes of the bulldozers that came to dig up the pastoral expanse outside Baltimore to make way for new construction. He remembers watching “as this gorgeous farm that was my everything was torn up and turned into a subdivision.” He saw it, he told me, as “a decision of people in my family to value money over the environment, over people, over family.”

Years later, as a student at Oberlin College, Roswell organized classmates to pressure the school to invest its endowment in environmentally sustainable ways. At the same time, he kept his own wealth under wraps, as did many of his well-to-do peers who, he says, “didn’t know how to feel integrity and be wealthy, so they just pretended they weren’t.” Roswell felt an added burden because of his wealth’s origins and scale: His great-grandfather was Louis Blaustein, founder of the American Oil Co., or Amoco. Though the family is largely out of the oil business today, its net worth – some $2.2 billion – makes it one of the richest in the United States. The extended family manages at least six foundations with nearly $290 million in assets.

Roswell finally outed himself as rich when he volunteered to front the travel costs for a group of Oberlin students who wanted to attend a climate-change conference. That’s when two housemates told him about an organization called Resource Generation (RG). A nonprofit group based in New York, Resource Generation focuses on organizing wealthy young people to recognize their unearned privilege, make peace with it – and then relinquish much of it by giving away a large percentage of their money. Roswell read an RG book titled “Classified: How to Stop Hiding Your Privilege and Use It for Social Change” and began attending meetings of the group in Durham, North Carolina, where he’d moved with his girlfriend, Maggie Heraty, after graduation. Up to that point, he had given away “maybe $100 or $500” a year, he recalls. “In 2014, as I started to get aware, I gave $10,000. In 2015, it was $30,000 or $50,000. By 2016, as Maggie and I were really starting to do this, we gave away $200,000.” So far, Roswell, now 29, has given away about $1.6 million of the $7.5 million he knows he will inherit.

Before he learned about Resource Generation, Roswell recalls, “I didn’t understand how to be activated as an organizer and as a wealthy person. I didn’t know what my place was.” The same can be said for most of RG’s 700 members, wealthy millennials and Gen-Zers between 18 and 35 who have an uneasy relationship with their money and the privilege that underpins it. “Got class privilege and want social justice?” reads the slogan on the organization’s website. Resource Generation wants to help.

In 1998, Tracy Hewat and Lynne Gerber, two well-to-do young Boston-area women who felt alienated from the established world of philanthropy because of their youth, formed a group they called Comfort Zone. They conceived it as a place to talk about being a wealthy, privileged young person who nevertheless wanted a more equitable society.

Comfort Zone changed its name to Resource Generation in 2000. It was a practical change – “the youngest members of the board said that [the old name] sounded too much like a shoe brand,” Hewat once said – but it also represented a change in purpose. Until then, the organization had served mainly as a place for wealthy people to talk about bringing their identity in line with their values, but now it would push them to give.

Today, Resource Generation has 16 chapters nationwide and 14 full-time employees. Members pay annual dues that start at $250 and vary depending on their level of wealth. (Dues are limited to 10% of a member’s giving to make sure they are donating primarily to other organizations.) The group asks its members to give generously to grass-roots organizations that they believe will do the long-term, nitty-gritty work to meaningfully change the circumstances that lead to wealth inequality – from establishing affordable housing and improving educational opportunities to serving at-risk youth, addressing climate injustice and supporting workers’ rights. In the process, Resource Generation aims to change the conversation about how the rich got their privilege and what they can do to spread the wealth.

The idea, says Resource Generation’s executive director, Iimay Ho, is to “do voluntary redistribution in service of involuntary redistribution.” The hope, she says, is that voluntary redistribution will give more economic and political power to those who typically don’t have it: low-wage workers, the formerly incarcerated, the homeless, the poor. That might then lead to policies – a livable minimum wage, equitable education – that could help decrease wealth inequality.

At conferences, in webinars and in local working groups, and through RG books and peer-to-peer mentorship, members learn how to shed entitled assumptions. One bedrock Resource Generation practice is educating members to work closely with community organizations in what it calls “right relationship” – not dictating how donated funds should be used, but supporting local leaders, who are often poor or working class and are closest to the problems they seek to address. “The goal is not to be in circles of young people with wealth deciding how money and resources are distributed,” former executive director Elspeth Gilmore told me. “That’s the status quo. That’s how power is maintained.”

Striving to change the status quo through charitable giving has a fraught history. Philanthropy has been a controversial pursuit since at least the Gilded Age, when workers began to organize in response to widening wealth inequality as industrial capitalism took hold. Critics at the time argued that robber barons such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller were elevating their own position in society by depressing workers’ incomes and using philanthropy to dictate where profits went and to which causes. Traditional philanthropy, says Ho, reinforces the idea that the wealthy know best how to solve social ills, when the reality is that “the wealthy elite cause a lot of the problems in the first place.”

As Peter Buffett (son of Warren) wrote in a 2013 New York Times opinion piece, philanthropy has become big business. High-profile foundations and nonprofit organizations, constrained by donor desires and restrictive grant conditions, often oppose the initiatives most likely to actually mitigate inequality, such as raising taxes or lobbying for a higher minimum wage. As of 2009, only about 3% to 5% percent of charitable foundation giving was estimated to go to organizations serving the neediest, and even less to efforts to change circumstances rather than relieve them – job training vs. food banks, for instance. The rest goes to institutions that aren’t directly devoted to relieving poverty or wealth inequality: universities, hospitals and arts organizations. Furthermore, charitable giving comes with tax deductions that are usually only accessible to the wealthy. And philanthropy famously yields social returns, as donors are rewarded with their names on buildings or board rosters and the chance to rub shoulders at social events.

“Philanthropy is all about class privilege,” says Hilary Pennington, executive vice president for programs at the 84-year-old Ford Foundation. “Anyone with power doesn’t give power up easily. It’s a question of how do you use your privilege? That’s what’s very admirable about RG. They’re really open to hearing answers that might be really uncomfortable and hard.”

To its critics, traditional philanthropy lets the wealthy feel as though they’re contributing to a more just and equal society without giving up any of their comforts. Anand Giridharadas, author of “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World,” describes the prevailing rules of philanthropy as follows: “Inspire the rich to do more good, but never, ever tell them to do less harm; inspire them to give back, but never, ever tell them to take less.” He suggests that more-ethical philanthropists would fund causes that directly undermine the class-based stratification that put them in their privileged positions to begin with – for example, rooting out tax havens or taking legal action to divorce public-school funding from property taxes, a system that gives wealthy areas better schools. Doing right on these issues, he says, would hurt the wealthy.

Resource Generation believes – or hopes – that young people are more willing to betray their own class privilege than previous generations. Giridharadas told me that he routinely receives letters from “younger people who find themselves plutocrats, whether by inheritance or [because] they made money, who are in many cases very tortured and confused by the position in which they stand.” What has changed is that “a lot of people are interested in making a different choice but don’t quite know how.”

Millennials straddle the American wealth divide in complicated ways. On the one hand, they have inherited increased economic uncertainty: depressed wages, soaring student loan debt, the insecurity of the gig economy. Many find themselves in a more economically precarious position than their parents. On the other hand, there are more than 11 million millennial households with incomes of $100,000 or more, and millennials stand to inherit some $30 trillion in family wealth over the coming decades, according to AARP statistics.

Resource Generation positions itself as the natural gathering place for the wealthiest end of this emergent socioeconomic class. Although it is majority white by a large margin, mirroring the racial wealth gap, 13% of its members are people of color – closely tracking the 12% of wealthy young Americans who are black or brown – and nearly 60% identify as LGBTQ. Nearly 2 in 3 members are women.

Andrea Pien is a 33-year-old college counselor at a private high school in San Francisco who is active in her local chapter of Resource Generation. Pien’s wealth comes from her father, a Taiwanese immigrant who made a fortune in biotech and pharmaceuticals. Although she stands to inherit as much as $12 million, she doesn’t have access to that money now, nor, like many members of Resource Generation, does she know her family’s exact worth. The money she does have is managed by a financial adviser her father selected.

Pien owns a home in San Francisco. She shares a car with her husband, though she mainly uses public transportation. She rarely eats out and travels modestly, but she divulged (somewhat apologetically) that she sometimes takes a yoga class or a Lyft ride. Some of those things “people would criticize as luxuries,” she says, but “part of that is self-care that everyone deserves. And that’s what helps me have the energy to do a lot of the work I do for Resource Generation.” Listening to Pien and others sort out how to reconcile their desire for equality with their lifestyles, I sometimes heard a reflexive defensiveness. Temptations were everywhere: whether to buy property (especially in gentrifying areas), whether it was OK to hoard money for a rainy day, whether to maintain small lifestyle luxuries even while “spending down” inherited wealth.

Pien is especially conflicted about betraying her father’s pride in being a successful immigrant, feelings that she has been working through with Resource Generation. She feels sure that she owes society some of what she’s inherited, but, she wonders, “Can I be a good steward of the wealth the first generation created?” She speaks of an “internalized model-minority narrative” in which people of color “need to be at the top to make way for other minorities or POC.” She worries that giving away her money would mean there would be one fewer Asian American represented among the top 10% – but is that a net negative? She’s not sure. “There are lots of mixed messages from meritocracy capitalism,” Pien says.

Exactly how minority dynamics should feature in RG’s mission and practice is a topic of conversation. “For many folks of color it can be a point of pride that your family worked really hard, and that you’re the first generation to have these particular benefits or educational achievements,” says Nicole Lewis, a former Resource Generation national organizer, who is black. While the group routinely focuses discussion on members’ feelings of guilt about their unearned wealth, “a lot of those feelings are not mirrored in communities of color.” Members of color often rank sharing money with family or their communities as more important than donating to organizations – and these are valid feelings, Lewis says. From that perspective, the default position that “wealth that you didn’t generate from your own work has to be given away” felt to Lewis like “a very simplistic analysis.” Over time, RG has acknowledged the need for greater nuance and has devoted resources to being more inclusive. (At the group’s behest, Lewis, who now works as a journalist, wrote a book on the subject, titled “Between a Silver Spoon and the Struggle: Reflections on the Intersection of Racism and Class Privilege.”)

Lewis’s assessment echoes other criticisms of the organization as a place for wealthy young (mostly white) liberals to launder their feelings of guilt and shame – a kind of woke philanthropic self-help group. A 2017 HuffPost article, for example, name-checked Resource Generation as one of a slew of predominantly white-led groups that are precisely the kinds of organizations racial justice organizing doesn’t need.

Katie Wang, a Los Angeles-based RG organizer, remembers attending the group’s marquee conference, Making Money Make Change, in 2017. A signature activity at the conference is calculating attendees’ total wealth and then contrasting how much members are already giving with their giving potential. It’s meant to be a galvanizing moment: This is what we can do if we do it together.

Wang was buoyed by the activity, but later, a black woman invited to lead a session as someone doing the kind of work the group hopes to support brought Wang back to earth. Being one of the only non-wealthy people of color in the room was deeply uncomfortable for her, the woman confessed. For Wang, the feel-good moment had been edifying, but “it doesn’t make those power dynamics, and these truths, go away.”

In the fall of 2018, Resource Generation announced a “giving pledge,” encouraging its members to establish an annual donation goal with an eye toward redistributing “all or almost all inherited wealth and/or excess income.” It was a deliberate attempt to evolve beyond the organization’s sometimes squishy reputation as a place for members to work through their feelings without imposing measurable benchmarks.

The group’s new guidelines encourage all members to increase the amount they give. The first step is to calculate how much a member is giving relative to assets and income. To start with, members might give away 1% to 7% of their assets annually. Seven percent represents an important threshold: It’s the average annual return on stock market investments, so if members give less than that, they’re still making money off their wealth – a big no-no.

One feature of Resource Generation’s target demographic is that many members don’t yet have children. Giving away an inheritance means there will be significantly less for any progeny.

After that, RG asks members to begin to spend down their wealth, giving 10% or more of their assets and income a year. From there, RG continues to encourage members to double their giving every one to three years. “Choose an amount that will make you feel proud, like you’ve really showed up,” the group advises. “Give enough that it feels risky – if you feel comfortable, you’re probably not stretching enough. If you feel destabilized, it might be too much.”

One feature of Resource Generation’s target demographic is that many members don’t yet have children. Giving away an inheritance means there will be significantly less for any progeny – a financial decision that many RG skeptics see as irresponsible, unrealistic or a potential source of regret. One criticism of the group’s focus on adults younger than 35 is that the model indoctrinates wealthy progressives before they feel the urge to pass their assets to their offspring. The idea of redistributing your wealth rather than giving it to your heirs can be much more difficult to stomach if children are in the picture. “There’s a way in which the rubber hits the road in stopping intergenerational wealth transfer if you have kids,” says Ho.

Still, many members and alumni maintain that, having established a giving practice with Resource Generation, they won’t change their plans if they add children to the mix. RG staff and members see this as part of their commitment to redistribution. “I have a partner and plan to have a child,” says former director Gilmore, “and though I know complicated choices lie ahead, I also know that … a child who is connected to other people, the planet and justice will have a better shot at being happy and giving back than one that has more resources than anyone around them.”

I spoke with Chuck Collins, a progressive activist and author and an heir to the Oscar Mayer fortune, who gave away his half-million-dollar inheritance (the equivalent of more than $1.1 million today) when he was 26. Collins, now 60, works as director of the inequality program at the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington-based think tank. He describes himself as an “honorary elder” of Resource Generation, whose members often seek his perspective. I asked if he had regrets about giving away his inheritance. On the contrary, he responded. He’d achieved what he set out to do: to knit himself into a broader community. His children graduated from college with debt. It’s a burden he wishes nobody would have to bear, but making these problems your own “is essentially putting your stake with the commonweal,” he said.

Resource Generation’s giving pledge netted a commitment of $25 million in the first six months, Ho says. Several members I spoke with give 10% of their wealth a year. Pien is among them: She distributes about $15,000 each year to organizations such as the Black Organizing Project, which, among other goals, works to diminish police presence in Oakland schools, and Critical Resistance, a prison abolition group. Since she doesn’t have access to her full inheritance, that level of giving feels sustainable to her.

Laura Wernick, a professor in Fordham University’s Graduate School of Social Service who studies Resource Generation’s philanthropic model, told me that most of the members she has surveyed over the past 10 years ended up giving more than they had planned, including those with their own forms of instability (a child with a disability, for instance). She also said that Resource Generation measurably influences more than just charitable giving. Members enrolled in law school shift to public interest work, for example, and those working in nonprofit organizations or traditional philanthropy begin to gravitate toward movement-oriented work.

For his part, David Roswell – who in addition to his political organizing spends his days working as a ceramist – plans to redistribute all his inherited wealth or excess income. He concedes that’s a moving target: Trust funds mature, companies are liquidated and relatives die – and all these events will funnel more money his way. “I don’t think I will ever be in a place of really hitting that ‘enough’ boundary,” he told me.

Roswell remains committed to the principles he learned through Resource Generation. Over the past several years, he’s been involved in efforts to create permanent affordable housing in the Durham area and to elect working-class people and people of color to local leadership. Resource Generation has also made him a skilled fundraiser: With the connections he has made, he says, he can raise $15,000 in a matter of days.

This past summer, he and Heraty were busy setting up an independent community fund for North and South Carolina called the Cypress Fund. Following RG principles, they will recruit donors, but they won’t stipulate where the donors’ money will go; community members from across the class spectrum will make those decisions. Because so much wealth is concentrated in the Northeast and on the West Coast, Roswell says, the South historically has fewer philanthropic dollars and even less devoted to grass-roots organizing. “For a long time we’ve heard people saying, ‘If only there was a social justice fund that did democratic giving in the South, we’d be all over it,’ ” Roswell says. “Finally it made sense to make it happen.”

Roswell has also persuaded his family to carve out a dedicated climate justice fund from their philanthropic giving, which he and several cousins of his generation will control. He hasn’t been able to persuade his family to spend down their foundation’s endowment, but he says they’re actively “thinking about what reparations means for an oil family trying to repair harm that we’ve caused in the Gulf South and across the world.”

Not that these conversations have been without tension. According to Roswell, his mother, for one, worries that he is moving too quickly, making reckless decisions about enormous sums. Other relatives are more pointed: “There are messages from my grandparents and other people that my great-grandfather made this wealth so my children and my children’s children could go to the same private schools I went to,” Roswell says. To that end, Roswell’s grandparents have already set up trust funds of about $3 million for his nonexistent children and grandchildren. (He says he doesn’t know whether he’ll have kids.)

Still, he’s optimistic: “I think the mirror I’ve been holding up has been helpful, and that my family is changing how they’re approaching their own giving.” Ultimately, however, philanthropy’s real goal, he says, should be “to make itself not exist anymore.”

The setting was an economic conference sponsored by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that spoke volumes about the country’s uncertain state. The nearest airport to Mariupol had been destroyed in the fighting. For many of the attendees, the fastest route to the conference was a brutal 18-hour train ride.

Among the conference’s big attractions was a chance to pitch Ukraine’s president ideas for sparking the economy. Each of the hundreds of attendees got two minutes.

The other big lure was Taylor. Well-wishers swarmed him. The governor of the war-scarred Luhansk region, still partially controlled by Kremlin-backed separatists, told him that he had read all of his prepared testimony and quoted back a few of the kind words Taylor had said about Ukraine.

By early January, Taylor was back home in the Washington suburbs trying to make sense of the surreal swirl of his time in Ukraine, his testimony before Congress and the rancorous aftermath.

His mind turned to Mariupol and then to Trump, whose antipathy toward Ukraine was, for him, among the biggest mysteries of all.

“I’m trying to figure out where [it] came from,” he said, “this deep suspicion of this little country. I mean it’s 44 million people. It’s not that big a deal.”

Trump has emerged from his acquittal in the Senate impeachment trial aggrieved and triumphant. Those who testified against him – a mix of political appointees and career bureaucrats – are trying to figure out their place in the Washington left behind following his acquittal.

Last week,Trump banished Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman from the White House and suggested he should face disciplinary action from the military for testifying against him. Vindman returned to the Pentagon, which has said it isn’t investigating him.

Marie Yovanovitch, forced last spring from her position as ambassador in Kyiv by Trump, left the government and delivered a powerful speech lamenting the costs to the State Department and America’s standing in the world. “An amoral, keep-’em-guessing foreign policy that substitutes threats, fear and confusion for trust cannot work over the long haul,” she warned on Wednesday.

The aftermath for Taylor, who was hurriedly dispatched to Ukraine as an emergency fill-in for Yovanovitch, has been quieter. He’s currently taking time off, catching up with his family and considering his next move. Like Yovanovitch, he has had plenty of time to ponder the damage. Taylor dedicated his life to service within the vast foreign policy institutions that the United States built following the war. Since his days as an infantry officer in Vietnam, he lived by their rules, which he saw as “cumbersome, but thorough,” a necessity for a great power whose routine decisions could alter the course of millions of lives in faraway places like Kyiv or Mariupol.

Trump was the first president Taylor had served who held these institutions in contempt. He doubted their loyalty and distrusted their expertise, often preferring the musings of television commentators or his conspiracy-minded personal attorney to the experts on his White House staff and in his intelligence briefings.

Most Americans describe Trump in Manichaean terms – he’s brilliant or terrible, compassionate or irredeemably cruel. To Taylor, he was beyond his comprehension.

“I don’t understand the president,” he said. “I can’t get in his head to see what motivates him and what he thinks.”

Sometimes, he wondered if it was even worth trying.

Last spring, Taylor was out of the government and serving as the executive vice president at the U.S. Institute of Peace, a nonpartisan think tank established by Congress, when George Kent, a former State Department colleague and future impeachment inquiry witness, asked if he might “hypothetically” be interested in serving as the ambassador to Ukraine. Yovanovitch was fighting a smear campaign fomented by self-interested Ukrainian politicians and the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.

The following day, Kent called him back. “It’s no longer hypothetical,” he said.

Taylor’s wife, Deborah, urged him to reject the job. A big worry was her husband’s reputation. Nearly five decades of government service had instilled in him a respect for his chain of command and an instinct for compromise. Both were potentially lethal traits inside the Trump administration.

“Bill’s Achilles’ heel – and everyone has them – is wanting to find agreement,” she said. “I was concerned he’d sully himself. . . . He passed that test.”

Shortly before he left for Ukraine, Taylor got a lesson in how power works in Trump’s Washington. In May, he learned from officials in the White House that Trump had refused to sign a letter congratulating Ukraine’s president on his resounding election victory.

Taylor raised his concerns about Trump with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

“I think your boss doesn’t like Ukraine,” Taylor said, still doubtful that he would take the job.

“You’re right and it’s my job to turn him around,” Pompeo replied, according to several U.S. officials familiar with the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly.

Taylor then mentioned the unsigned letter. “Find out about this,” Pompeo told his staff. Within 36 hours, a new letter had been drafted and signed by the president.

Taylor tucked a copy of it in a briefcase and headed off to Ukraine.

Each morning at 8:30 a.m. in Kyiv, Ukrainian troops gather in formation outside the Ministry of Defense. A soldier rings a bell. Shots are fired. An officer then reads the names of the Ukrainian soldiers killed on that day over the course of the country’s six-year war with Russian-backed separatists.

When Sens. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and Ron Johnson, R-Wis., visited Kyiv last fall, Taylor took them to the ceremony. He wanted them to see a bit of Ukraine as he saw it: patriotic, fragile and under daily assault from Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Taylor arrived in Ukraine in June 2019, just weeks after Zelensky won the presidency in a landslide. He believed that the 2013 Ukrainian revolution, followed by Russia’s invasion a few months later and annexation of Crimea, had created a new sense of solidarity in the country. Corruption was still rampant. The war had ravaged the economy. But, there was a hope for Ukraine that wasn’t present when he left in 2009, after concluding his stint as ambassador under President George W. Bush.

“There’s an idealism, a spirit of youth, a charm represented by this new president,” he said. “It’s a chance. A real chance, which you don’t get very often in the history of countries.”

About a month after Taylor arrived in Kyiv, he learned via a routine conference call with Washington that Trump had ordered a hold on $391 million in aid to Ukraine. Initially, he assumed it was a misunderstanding.

Weeks passed and the hold remained in place. Kurt Volker, the administration’s special representative to Ukraine, and Gordon Sondland, a Trump megadonor serving as ambassador to the European Union, blamed the problem on Giuliani.

Both later became impeachment witnesses.

Their fix was to broker a deal that might get Giuliani to back off. Giuliani was looking for dirt on former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter, who had been paid between $50,000 and $100,000 a month to serve on the board of a Ukrainian gas company. The Ukrainians wanted an Oval Office visit for Zelensky.

Taylor urged Zelensky’s top advisers to keep their distance. “Rudy is up to no good. If you think he’s doing this because he cares about Ukraine, you’re wrong,” he warned Andriy Yermak, a top aide to Zelensky.

On August 27, national security adviser John Bolton visited Kyiv for a meeting with Zelensky, who still did not know the aid was frozen. Before Bolton left, Taylor asked for five minutes with him at his hotel. Taylor worried that if the aid freeze became public, it would undermine Zelensky and strengthen Putin. Bolton asked Taylor to make the case for the aid to Pompeo in a cable.

“It’ll get noticed,” he promised.

In the cable’s last line, Taylor made it clear that if the hold wasn’t lifted, he wouldn’t be able to support the policy and would resign. It was the first time in almost 50 years of government service that he had threatened to quit.

At that point, Taylor had no idea a CIA whistleblower had accused Trump of using “the power of his office to solicit interference . . . in the 2020 U.S. election.” The complaint, emailed to the intelligence community’s inspector general on Aug. 12, was a bomb ready to explode.

By early January, it was clear that Trump was most likely going to be acquitted. In Kyiv, Taylor got a glimpse of the likely aftermath. He was finishing his tour as acting ambassador and preparing for a Pompeo visit on Jan. 2.

A senior aide to the secretary informed him that Pompeo wanted to meet with the Ukrainian president in Kyiv one-on-one, without embassy staff to take notes.

“I’m going to protest,” Taylor told officials in Washington. “I’m going to become a pain on this.” Taylor worried that such an arrangement would signal that Pompeo didn’t trust his embassy staff. Ukrainians might conclude that they couldn’t trust the embassy either.

In Kyiv, Taylor quickly realized that he – not the embassy – was the problem.

Taylor hadn’t spoken to Pompeo since his meeting in May, prior to taking the job. But, he knew that his testimony had upset the president, who blasted him as a “never Trumper,” a subset of Republicans Trump described as “human scum.”

So, Taylor proposed that his deputy accompany the secretary to the meeting. Pompeo’s staff agreed. Then they asked Taylor to leave his position six days early so that he would not be in charge when Pompeo arrived in Kyiv.

Last month, Taylor returned to Washington and the modest bungalow that he and his wife bought in 1983 as he was beginning his government career.

Scattered amid a lifetime of mementos from postings in Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine and Israel, were reminders of the last few tumultuous months.

On the coffee table by the front door, there was a picture of Taylor testifying before Congress – a gift from Yovanovitch. Upstairs, a block of wood with the message “Stand Your Ground,” etched in Russian, sat on Taylor’s desk. He had been given it a few days earlier by another impeachment witness.

At the dining room table, Deborah, a biblical scholar, was translating a text from ancient Greek. A bracelet from Ukraine bearing an anti-Putin epithet dangled from her wrist.

Taylor had caught snippets of the Senate trial in the car. His wife, who had watched “every frigging second” of the House hearings, was avoiding it.

“I am not learning anything,” she said of the Senate proceedings. “I am just experiencing the emotion.”

Earlier that day, Pompeo made his visit to Kyiv, which had been delayed a month. Taylor was pleased to see a photograph of Kristina Kvien, the acting ambassador, with Pompeo and the Ukrainian foreign minister.

After his meeting, Pompeo pledged that America’s support for Ukraine “would not waver.” To back up that promise, the Trump administration said it was budgeting another $400 million in aid to Ukraine for 2021. The move had strong bipartisan backing from Congress.

Some former officials, such as Yovanovitch, were warning of the damage wrought by Trump. “Right now, the State Department is in trouble,” she said.

Taylor tended to focus on how well Washington’s institutions had held up, in spite of the battering.

Trump might still despise Kyiv. His strange affection for Putin almost certainly remained. At the highest levels of government, senior officials still had to work around Trump’s grudges, impulses and rages.

But for all the chaos of the past few months, Taylor noted that the administration’s official policy toward Ukraine and Russia – articulated by Pompeo, supported by Congress and codified in White House strategy documents – remained essentially unchanged. Ukraine was still America’s ally. Russia was still an adversary. This was one more lesson of the impeachment saga. In much of institutional Washington – Bill Taylor’s Washington – the president was strangely the outsider.

As a professor of environmental law at Columbia University, Britton-Purdy was acutely aware of the ominous implications of the city’s record highs. As a new father, what was there to do but revel in his child’s first true sense of springtime?

“These are the first beautiful days he is feeling: We walk out in the warm sun, we laugh together, we look at a tree,” Britton-Purdy says. “Yet the experience is infused with all of this harm, all of this damage that has made this beautiful, beautiful day that I’m having with him.” He sighs. “We really haven’t figured out, he and I, what to do with that yet.”

What to do with that – a world that is breaking down, and a child who is growing up? Parents are meant to be guardians and guides, the ones to help their offspring make sense of the present and envision a future. Philosophically, and practically, this is a daunting task in the best of times – and these are not the best of times, particularly if one happens to be a climate scientist, or an environmental justice activist, or anyone whose profession demands a constant, clear-eyed acknowledgment of the damage wrought by the climate crisis.

But this clarity can also be a gift, one that forces a sincere engagement with the problem. When Britton-Purdy became a father, his perception of the world and the threats against it shifted; the crisis, he says, took on a new immediacy.

“My own temperament is that I’ve always been able to go on, even with a sense of loss, and have kind of a cheerful attitude toward the future as a practical matter,” he says. “But now that I feel personally and intimately anchored in the future in a different way, I feel a different kind of fear. The fear is right up against my heart in a way that makes it harder to think about what comes next.”

After the birth of her son four years ago, climate scientist Kate Marvel experienced what she calls “a very profound revelation.” Marvel’s work for NASA and Columbia University involves projecting the future – not predicting, she emphasizes, but presenting possibilities of what could happen. Those projections once felt abstract. “But then I’m realizing, ‘Oh my God, somebody I love is going to be 35 in 2050,’ ” she says. “And that was just a very visceral thing for me.”

One day last year, Marvel and her son stepped aboard the shuttle that runs between Grand Central Terminal and Times Square in New York City, and found themselves surrounded by a brilliant, bustling coral reef; the subway car was wrapped in an ad for David Attenborough’s “Our Planet” series. Her little boy was awestruck.

“And I remember thinking, suddenly: This may be the closest thing he ever sees to an actual coral reef,” she says. “I felt a jolt at that.”

But Marvel does not dwell on those sorts of thoughts, and when people ask her, as they often do, whether she is filled with existential dread as a climate scientist and a mother, she tells them emphatically that she is not. Her work has taught her that what matters is what we do right now, and the urgency of that edict leaves no room, no time for despondence.

“I think, when a lot of people talk about climate change and having kids, they’re looking to the future and despairing,” she says. “For me, it makes me look at the present and be incredibly resolved.”

– – –

In the face of potential climate catastrophe, some have questioned whether it’s moral to become a parent – is such a burden fair to the broken planet, or to the child who would inherit it? But Sarah Myhre, a climate scientist in Seattle and the mother of a 6-year-old son, rejects this line of thinking. You can’t save humanity by abandoning it, she says, and these sorts of messages are harmful to the children who are already here.

“Kids are listening to that, and what they hear is that their presence in this world is a violation of the world itself,” she says. “It’s really important to let kids know that they were born into a changing world, that they did not betray the world by being born, and that they are born into a time where they can do profound good and have really transcendent, powerful impacts on the world.”

That is what she’ll tell her son, when he’s old enough to ask about his future; for now, Myhre is focused on helping her son become the strongest, kindest person he can be.

“I believe that the through line for us, as communities, as individuals, is the humanity that we bring to solving problems,” she says. “Our ethic of care, our empathy, our stewardship of one another. And so I think that stewarding that particular aspect of my son’s internal life is really important to me, so that he is coming to the world with a robust, empathetic, integrated sense of self.”

This means that her family prioritizes quality time together, she says. “I have made a large pivot in my life, as a parent, toward the cultivation of joy on a daily basis,” she says. “It’s easy to say and a lot harder to do – because joy requires us to be vulnerable, it requires us to be in the moment.”

Joy is what Britton-Purdy wants for his son, too, and so he will pause on a walk to place the infant’s fingers against the knobby bark of a tree, and someday he will show his child how to use a knot of twigs to dam the flow of creekwater, the way he once did as a young boy on the farm in West Virginia where his family still lives. He will teach James to marvel at nature wherever he can find it.

“I want James to have an intimate foreground of experience that is really connected with the life of things, and the amazing wonder of living things, and not have his first thought be that it’s all going away,” Britton-Purdy says.

And when it is time to talk about what is going away, he will remind his son that things have always been going away, that the natural world has been inexorably altered by humanity for centuries. Britton-Purdy wants James to knows this: that beauty and change and loss have always coexisted.

“We have to not exaggerate or distort what it was like, or the nature of what’s being lost,” he says, “or else we will fall into a nostalgia for a world that never was.”

There is resilience to be found in an honest accounting of our past, says Heather McTeer Toney, a former regional Environmental Protection Agency administrator and national field director for Moms Clean Air Force. As an environmental justice activist and African American woman, she wants to instill the perseverance and perspective of her ancestors in her 3-year-old son and 14-year-old daughter: “We’ve had no choice other than to figure out how we’re going to adapt and live,” she says. “This is not new to us.”

Sometimes, after her children have gone to bed, she and her husband talk about where they should take the kids, the places they should see quickly, before they are irreparably changed. But when she speaks to her children about what lies ahead, there is no lingering in sorrow; she is determined that they will thrive.

“My entire ancestral line is built on, ‘You have to figure out how to make it work, how to survive, because no one is going to help you,’ ” she says. “I do not want my children operating in fear. I do not want them operating in a mind-set that all hope is lost. That is not my mind-set.”

A rash of violent storms recently swept through their town in Mississippi, and when the house lost power, Toney saw her teenager immediately reach for a flashlight and her smartphone. The storms, Toney says, have become more frequent lately, more severe, and she knows this pattern will worsen in the years ahead. She watched her daughter cradling her phone and thought of what would happen when, eventually, the battery died.

Toney’s response was pragmatic: She would show her daughter where the candles were kept, and teach her to make her own light.

– – –

How do we tell our children stories about the lives they might live, and the planet they will live on, with an ending that is still filled with possibility?

“It is true that everything is going to have to change, and it’s going to change one way or another – either because we’re undergoing profound climatic shifts, or because we’re going to have to change the way we get energy and the way we run society,” Kate Marvel says. “Especially for young people who have these amazing imaginations, that gives them space to dream. And I think right now we’re really just focusing on the nightmares.”

Parents must help their children imagine a future that is happy and safe, Sarah Myhre agrees – but to do that, they must first process their own sense of fear and loss. “If parents can’t transcend and make sense out of their feelings, and derive action and meaning from their feelings, then they are stuck,” she says, “and they are going to transpose that stuckness, that anxiety, onto their children.”

This has always been the work of parenting, all the more essential now in extraordinary times: to hold a steady balance between grief and gratitude, to find a way to move with purpose through a world that brims with both beauty and heartbreak.

Myhre feels this tension most in the North Cascades, where the snowline is receding steadily up the mountainsides – where, in recent years, the ski resorts she grew up frequenting have sometimes opened late and closed early. Throughout her formative years, there was nowhere that brought Myhre greater joy, and it has become her son’s favorite place, too. But someday in his adulthood, she knows, he won’t be able to ski on those slopes anymore.

“There is this finite and precious window that he’s in right now,” she says, “and it’s going to shut.”

This winter, Myhre has taken her child to the mountains every chance she gets. With each visit, his movements become more self-assured, more confident, more ecstatic. She follows through the snow, watching her son and his world transforming.

Deputy John Vaughan opened the door of an apartment that was empty enough to make his voice echo. A red scooter and an old crib were the only items left.

“Cleared!” he yelled after inspecting each room. The apartment complex’s custodian, who had been waiting outside, was allowed in and quickly began to change the locks.

The same scene was witnessed 14 times by a Washington Post reporter one November morning in this state capital, which according to data collected at Princeton’s Eviction Lab has the second-highest eviction rate in the country.

The Richmond City Sheriff’s Office had a light load that day: 55 eviction orders. On more typical days, the number jumps to 70 or higher, officials said.

In Southwood, a neighborhood where rents range from $500 to $800 a month for two-bedroom townhouses and apartments, advocates say it has become common to see people cram their belongings in plastic bags, place them in car trunks and leave their apartments before a handful of deputies come to knock on their door.

For many, these scenes are not new.

Advocates and experts say the eviction tradition in Richmond and other Southern cities and towns dates back generations, and has affected black communities the most.

“There has been a housing crisis, an eviction crisis and a displacement crisis for several decades,” said Benjamin Teresa, co-director of the RVA Eviction Lab at Virginia Commonwealth University, who has studied housing issues in Virginia and other Southern states.

He points to laws favoring landlords like “pay or quit,” which allows landlords to launch eviction proceedings five days after the payment grace period (other states provide up to 30 days).

Teresa said minority communities in Richmond are subjected to predatory lending and discrimination, especially renters who use federal housing vouchers. Landlords can refuse to accept vouchers, and he said landlords who do accept them often steer tenants to housing in poor neighborhoods.

With a new Democratic majority in the General Assembly, advocates were hoping for ambitious housing reform across the commonwealth this year. More than a dozen measures were introduced to tackle housing issues, but none “explicitly deals with eviction,” said Christie Marra, a family and housing attorney with the Virginia Poverty Law Center.

She said most of the focus has been on giving tenants tools to ensure their housing is safe and habitable, cap fees assessed after late rent payments and force landlords to make or pay for repairs.

A measure requiring landlords to provide tenants a list of their rights and responsibilities at the beginning of the lease term was approved by the Senate with bipartisan support and is awaiting action by the House.

The Senate unanimously approved and sent to the House a bill that would give tenants the right to make essential repairs and deduct them from their rent if a landlord refuses or does not take care of the issue within 14 days.

Another bill, proposed by state Sen. Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax, would allow judges to expunge eviction records from cases that were dismissed or withdrawn by the landlord. Such records can make it hard for renters to secure leases in the future. The bill passed the Senate unanimously and is expected to be heard in the House next week.

And despite opposition, the House approved 61 to 37 a bill that bans landlords from refusing housing vouchers as payment. The measure was referred to the Senate.

Marra said the legislation is leading the state in the right direction.

“I think we all needed time to see what could get done in some of these other areas,” she said. “And then regroup once this session ends to try to really focus on gathering together groups of tenants in the high evicting areas to hear directly from them.”

– – –

A few days after Vaughan searched the apartment with the red scooter, Laurette Turner, 64, sat at the end of a hotel bed on the other side of Richmond. She was talking to yet another employee of a housing organization that aims to help evictees.

She was evicted in June, along with her daughter and three grandchildren, from a government-subsidized apartment complex where she had lived for more than eight years, mostly on disability payments and government assistance.

Turner said the property managers at Townes at River South apartments lost two of her rent payments; staff at the complex said they were unable to comment on her case.

For more than six months, Turner sought help from nonprofits and government organizations in searching for permanent housing. Having an eviction on her rental record meant many landlords turned her away, she said, so cheap hotels were often the only option.

She compared rates, called reception desks, negotiated with case managers for enough funding to stay for a few days or a week. Each time she needed to leave, she moved her family’s belongings in plastic bags.

“Everybody thinks the homeless are the people on the street or the people walking up and down the street for money. Or people sleeping in their cars,” she said in her room at the Quality Inn in Northside Richmond. “But it’s more than that.”

Before Christmas, she found a landlord willing to rent them a townhouse for six months. “It has three bedrooms, one bath, living room, dining area and kitchen with washer and dryer hookups,” she texted a Washington Post reporter. “Thank God for his grace and mercy.”

Turner has been trying to get the landlord to install a washer and dryer, and hopes to extend the lease until the end of 2020. She also wants to pay a credit repair service she saw on television, which she believes could get the eviction erased from her record.

“I’m going to find out,” she said Tuesday.

Those carrying out removals were unaware an eviction epidemic was plaguing their hometown until Princeton’s Eviction Lab study, which found that the 10 U.S. cities with the highest eviction rates included five from Virginia: Richmond, Hampton, Newport News, Norfolk and Chesapeake.

“It was an eye-opener,” said Civil Process Sgt. Larry Trotter. “We have five deputies and we’re at number two. It’s not a number you celebrate. Nobody was celebrating.”

The attention, he says, prompted roundtable discussions with Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam and local officials, who sought his input on how to decrease the eviction rate. He believes, however, those efforts were flawed.

“The ones at the roundtables should have been the judges, and the ones who make these laws,” Trotter said. “Everybody wants a quick fix. There is no quick fix to it.”

Trotter, who is black and grew up in Petersburg, a city 21 miles south of Richmond, said he became a deputy sheriff because he wanted to help society and give law enforcement a positive light in his community.

” I wanted to be the person that people can say, ‘Okay, he has a badge, but he’s still him. He has a badge, but he’s not out here abusing me,’ ” he said. “Because that’s what I seen coming up.”

Years ago, Trotter was on the other side of an eviction order. He was unemployed and recovering from knee surgery when he was put out of his apartment.

He lived in his car and sent his family to stay with his in-laws.

He draws from his personal story to try to help those he evicts, telling them that instead of putting blame on others, they should instead learn what options are available and ask, “Where do I go from here?”

He carries pamphlets in his shirt pocket with information on legal and housing services, and even talks to evictees about openings at the Sheriff’s Office.

“I can do no more, no less with the power that I’m given,” Trotter said. “You don’t want to put people out, but you have to because you have to do your job.”