Mourning Tanta
Posted: Monday, December 01, 2008 4:40 PM by Chris Colvin
I can't remember exactly when I stumbled on the blog CalculatedRisk, but as a budding obsessive consumer of non-traditional financial media, I very quickly made CR my homepage, and found myself checking in with CalculatedRisk, his blog-partner Tanta, and their colorful gang of regular commenters several times a day. Tanta had a long career in mortgage banking and saying she knew her stuff is a massive understatement. She didn't just understand incredibly complicated topics down to the granular level, she could explain them to the layperson in an engaging way: she was quite simply one of the wittiest people to ever sit at a keyboard. Tanta's posts were always required reading, but I think I enjoyed watching her interact with readers in the comments section most of all, in threads that would go on and on. Sometimes it felt like eavesdropping on the most interesting dinner party conversation you ever heard, and the subject at hand was mortgage-backed securities.
Nothing I can say here would do justice to Tanta's writing, so I urge anyone who stops by the DailyNightly to go on over to CalculatedRisk and browse through the archives. Tragically, the archives are all we have. Tanta died yesterday morning after a long battle with ovarian cancer. I had a terrible time sleeping last night thinking of how much the world needs the kind of honestly and fearlessness Tanta brought to her blog. I never knew her "in real life" but I hope in hers-- which was much too short-- she realized how deeply she touched so many of her readers.
Doris Dungey-- Tanta-- was 47.
