NYT economics reporter David E. Rosenbaum is remembered eloquently by a WashPost colleague (and onetime rival)

I wish I had paid more attention to the byline of New York Times economics reporter David E. Rosenbaum, who died Sunday at the age of 63, apparently as the result of injuries suffered in a mugging near his D.C. home. Just days before, Rosenbaum—seen here with his family in a family photo—had retired after 37 years with the paper, and today Washington Post writer Glenn Kessler offers an appreciation of his longtime colleague and onetime rival that has me in tears.

"For all but three of those years," Kessler writes, "[Rosenbaum] was based in Washington, earning the kind of professional respect that most reporters can only dream of."

People like the cabalists around Chimpy Bush count on the economic illiteracy of us average citizens to enable them to slip through their assorted sordid agendas. Apparently Rosenbaum spent his career trying to pin down the reality of his beat and get it into print—all the while providing encouragement and support to developing or potential journalists he sensed might feel the same calling.

He doesn't seem to have had the kind of self-serving and self-promoting egomania for which big-time journalists at the NYT and elsewhere have lately become famous. He doesn't seem to have aspired to being a Sunday-morning Talking Head. Perhaps as a result, most of us barely recognize the name. While his death comes as a needlessly cruel reminder of the basic unfairness of life, I hope there's some comfort to his family and friends to have his life celebrated so eloquently.