Alex and Nazanin contemplating their newborn nephew Benno.

Alex & Adam’s story “The Giant Pool of Money” has just been named one of the top ten pieces of journalism in the past decade. The list was compiled by the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at NYU; they started with eighty nominees, and a very distinguished panel of judges selected the top ten, including books by Barbara Ehrenreich, Jane Mayer, Lawrence Wright and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, and Pulitzer-winning newspaper journalism from the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the New Orleans Times-Picayune and the Washington Post. Alex & Adam’s story, which ran as a full-hour episode of This American Life in May, 2008, was the first really good explanation of what was still being called “the subprime mortgage crisis”; it became the most-downloaded episode in the history of the show.

Introducing the list, NYU Journalism Professor Mitchell Stephens said “Ten years ago New York University, using some of the same judges, selected ‘the Top 100 Works of Journalism of the Twentieth Century in the United States.‘ It is our belief that the best journalism of the first decade of the twenty-first century belongs in that company.”

Like I said, pretty good company. Congratulations, Alex and Adam!