(Hi Gawker!)

Little known fact: Barack Obama attended Columbia University, the very same one that you do! While he was here, he wrote a thesis entitled Soviet Nuclear Disarmament, which is not actually a "thesis" (but more on that later). Anyway, the journalists have been trying to get their hands on the Lost Thesis but haven't been able to find it, and even Barack Obama himself claims he doesn't have it.

Now the scholarly treasure hunters have turned to Obama's old professor Michael Baron, who now lives in Florida and runs a digital media business. It was in Baron's American Foreign Policy honors seminar that Obama wrote the Lost "Thesis." According to the professor, Obama was "one of the top one or two students in class."

But Baron (over on the left) doesn't have the thesis either, apparently it was lost in a move or some such thing eight years ago.

What he does have is all the juicy details: "My recollection is that the paper was an analysis of the evolution of the arms reduction negotiations between the Soviet Union and the United States. At that time, a hot topic in foreign policy circles was finding a way in which each country could safely reduce the large arsenal of nuclear weapons pointed at the other [...] For U.S. policy makers in both political parties, the aim was not disarmament, but achieving deep reductions in the Soviet nuclear arsenal and keeping a substantial and permanent American advantage. As I remember it, the paper was about those negotiations, their tactics and chances for success. Barack got an A."

Meanwhile, Columbia has simply explained that no thesis exists because undergraduates didn't write theses in 1983.