Emdashes—Modern Times Between the Lines

The Basics:
About Emdashes | Email us

Before it moved to The New Yorker:
Ask the Librarians

Best of Emdashes: Hit Parade
A Web Comic: The Wavy Rule

 
December012008

An Obit Fit to Blog, and Print

Filed under: In Memoriam   Tagged: , , , , , ,

Jonathan Taylor writes:

Having taken note of Ben Bernanke's possible slowness on the uptake about the country's financial situation, it is, sadly, now an occasion to pay tribute one who did see what was coming, and who has died of ovarian cancer: "Tanta" of Calculated Risk, Doris Dungey. I recall reading a lot of predictions that there was going to be hell to pay from the mortgage market quite a while back, mostly at Atrios's place, and if I recall correctly, a lot of those posts were inspired by the work of Calculated Risk; naturally, I've been reading the site more and more in recent months.

I was also a little struck by the headline on Tanta's New York Times obituary: "Doris Dungey, Prescient Finance Blogger, Dies at 47." After all, an archive search shows that Tanta is just the third person identified primarily as a "blogger" to have been the subject of a Times obit. (The other two were Cathy Seipp and Steve Gilliard.)

Having attended the recent roundtable on obituary writing at the New York Public Library, I'm led to wonder how the Times is keeping tabs on who's worthy of an obit (not to mention The Verb) among bloggers. Not to be too morbid, but there will be more blogger obits, and Dungey's includes what may one day become a classic trope:

The blog quickly drew a lively and informed group of commentators, few livelier and none more informed than someone who called herself Tanta. She began by correcting some of Mr. McBride's posts. "She would tell me either I was wrong or the article I was quoting was wrong," he said Sunday. "It was clear she really knew her stuff. And she was funny about it."

Tanta soon graduated from merely commenting to being a full-scale partner. Her first post, in December 2006, took issue with an optimistic Citigroup report that maintained that the mortgage industry would "rationalize" in 2007, to the benefit of larger players like, well, Citigroup.

Comments

Why is it that people say they “slept like a baby” when babies wake up 10 times every hour?

Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, it may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Thanks for waiting.)

2008 Webby Awards Official Honoree