Remembering Jonathan Rowe.

• Author: Glastris, Paul
• Position: Obituary

On Sunday, March 20th, my friend and mentor Jonathan Rowe, a contributing editor of the Washington Monthly, died, swiftly and unexpectedly, of a sudden infection. The shock of this news has not worn off. The tragedy of it is still sinking in.

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Jon was sixty-five, by all accounts healthy and supremely happy, living the good life in Point Reyes Station, California, with his wife, Mary Jean Espulgar-Rowe, and their eight-year-old son, Joshua. As a writer, he was in a zone, producing well-crafted pieces for a variety of outlets on the subject that had occupied his brilliant mind for decades: the failure of conventional economic thinking to account for or explain the workings of vast parts of our lived reality, in particular the cooperative realms of family and neighborhood and civic society, and the way the market has been relentlessly eating into these invaluable realms. Much recent history, from the collapse of the financial markets to the rise of behavioral economics to the failure of rising GDP to increase wages or well-being, has essentially validated don's insights. In a just world he would have lived long enough to garner some glory for his prescience.

The funny and touching thing about don, though, was his almost complete lack of interest in personal glory. I have never worked with someone--certainly no writer--more genuinely humble and self-effacing. He was unfailingly kind, with an unmistakable inner light--he was a man of faith, though he almost never talked about it. He spoke with a gentleness bordering on diffidence, but also with a winning twinkle of humor. He had a subtle, original, and powerful mind, and a way of elevating any conversation such that you found yourself trying to express your own ideas with greater care, the intellectual equivalent of sitting up a little straighter in your chair. He was indifferent to money and material possessions--a characteristic he shared with his first boss in Washington, Ralph Nader (who calls Jon "as incorruptible a person as you will ever meet--honest to his intellectual and ethical core"), and with his first editor, Charlie Peters (who says Jon was "the nearest thing to a saint" to ever come out of the magazine).

His...