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In This Issue

• Water On The Knee
• The Annihilator of Mathematics
• Demonic Speak-n-Spell
• The Fed Interviews Jon Voight
• Letters to the Feditors
• Sam Jenning, or: Eating Children For Profit
• Immigrate This!
• Where In Our Hearts Is Carmen Sandiego?
• The Life and Times of Carmen Sandiego
• Redder Rabbit?
• Good Golly Fucking Gumdrops, I Like Candy!
• The City’s New Hot, Sexy, Superhot Nightclub!
• Where's Waldo?
• Logical Journey into Eugenics
• Think Columbia Sucks? It's Your Fault, Doofus.
• A Farewell to Harms
• A Farewell To Bill
• Tracy Briskit, Fed Queen
• Make Your Own Safe Space!
• Columbia Trail: Safe Space, Bathroom in 347 miles
• Cook with Barney!
• THEY Watch
• The Staff of 21.8
• The Staff of Volume 21

Michael Brayden

So, I’m sitting here with this book, All about Hedge Funds, and a grande mocha frappuccino.  Several years ago, I would never have thought this moment to be possible.  Several years ago, I didn’t drink coffee, frapp’d or otherwise, and I couldn’t stand the thought of living downtown or working in finance.  Several years ago, I was trying to figure out what tattoos I wanted to get, how to keep my shoulder length hair out of my eyes, and what potable drinks I could possibly make out of Gatorade and tequila.

    Yet, here I am, every inch the soon-to-be yuppie.  Why?  Because, god as my witness, I fucking love money.

    O, Potential Employers from Years in The Future, think not poorly upon me when you Google my name on the PDA chips that were installed in your brains.  There is more to me than the reckless drinking and boundless greed about which I have written.  Don’t pigeonhole me; there’s no Myers-Briggs type for “incredibly talented and attractive” and “deserving of all your money.”  No, I am a complex man with complex feelings about complex issues, much like R. Kelly.  Do not trap me in your closet.

    Where did it all begin?  There are many reasons why I came to Columbia, but I suspect that chief among them was the baby-blue Columbia pennant my dad hung in my room when I was six.  So, I know it sounds bad considering he supported me for some twenty-two odd years but, for brainwashing me, Dad: go to hell.  

    What attracted me to the Fed was in the middle of the orientation issue from my first year.  It was bunch of photos of “Girls of Butler gone Slightly Wild” and of Fed Bash.  Fed Bash.  I saw those pictures and I knew my destiny.  I didn’t know how I was going to do Fed Bash, or when, but I knew I was going to do it.  Step one was joining The Fed.  This proved easy enough as they had absolutely no standards.  However, after five months of attending most of the meetings while contributing absolutely nothing to magazine, the staff began to get wary of me.  Imagine the staff as grizzly bears: you can live among them for a while, but they’ll eventually get suspicious if you don’t eat raw salmon out of the river.  Sensing their apprehension, I wrote an article, and there it was on the front page of the next issue.

    To this day, I usually only read my own articles in The Fed.

    I’m not sure how I became editor-in-chief, but it probably didn’t hurt to sleep around and buy the staff a lot of booze.  Usually the outgoing EIC writes about the next EIC is capable or attractive or whatever.  I’m just going to lay this out there: I have no faith in Kareem because he does not drink.   Yes, there’s a lot more to running an organization than drinking, but I simply don’t know how Kareem is supposed to hack it without alcohol, or what I like to call “leaderjuice.”

    On the other hand, he’s tall, so that helps.  In fact, the executive board in general is pretty tall, so that’s good.  Also, our new head submissions editor is in possession of “geometrically perfect” boobs, which is fantastic and a reliable measure of her competency.

    In short, I’m curious to see what happens in the future of The Fed.  I am neither certain of its success nor anxious about its possible failure.  At the very least, the new staff has proven itself capable of the fundamentals: selling advertisements and leering at prospective students.  My parting advice is this: be sexier.  Y’all be some ugly motherfuckers and this paper can’t function without sexual tension. So, stop sleeping with each other, get good haircuts, work out, and use your bodies to lure people into the organization.  I understand Kareem’s plan to “not verbally harass” new writers and I think I could have benefited from such a scheme.  I duly apologize to Michael Grinspan, whom I love.  However, refraining from the abuse of first-years is meaningless if we are not good looking.  I see Grinspan at the gym. He understands.  The rest of you only disappoint me.

    I suppose I’ll wrap up by saying I will never ever be ashamed of my work here.  I did more for this community than most undergrads, and you can take that to the several banks where I’ll be storing my sizable income.  Who says activism and obscene wealth are incompatible?  Socialists, that’s who, and all of them belong in prison.