Tanta

by hilzoy

From the NYT (via Calculated Risk):

"The blogger Tanta, an influential voice on the mortgage collapse, died Sunday morning in Columbus, Ohio.

Tanta, who wrote for Calculated Risk, a finance and economics blog, was a pseudonym for Doris Dungey, 47, who until recently had lived in Upper Marlboro, Md. The cause of death was ovarian cancer, her sister, Cathy Stickelmaier, said."

CalculatedRisk has more.

This is very sad. My thoughts are with her friends and family.

Comments

[ThatLeftTurnInABQ]

Thanks for putting this up as a top level post, hilzoy.

In addition to the impact on her family and friends, this is a huge loss for the econ-blog community. Last night I put up a brief summary of what her writing meant to me personally here.

It used to make for a moment of widespread shared grief and reflection, and a marker of the passing years, when a well known journalist passed away. Sadly, today there are few journalists in the MSM truly deserving of that sort of tribute. That baton has been taken up by the best of the bloggers. Tanta was one of them.

[Nell]

Tanta's death is a particularly painful loss. She was an exemplar of the blogging ideal: using expertise to demystify a subject for amateurs and writing with a distinctive, appealing voice. She helped give credibility to blogging at its best.

And she was a smart, kind, fearless woman.

Tanta vive!

[AIMAI]

Thank you so much for putting this up, Hilzoy. I went over and read some of the tributes to this amazing woman. What an incredible writer, what a voice, what a terrible loss for us all.

aimai

[Noumenon]

Her list of UberNerd posts about mortgages is a great legacy. I read the one about negative amortization, became smarter, then read the one about mortgage origination channels and felt it would actually be fun to read the whole thing -- it's like you suddenly stumbled on the Steven Hawking who is the only guy in the world to accessibly explain physics. She was really, really good.