Have you ever interned for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump (or any of the other candidates hoping to grab their party’s 2016 presidential nomination)? Are you currently interning for one of them? If your answer to either question is Yes!, you should dig out the intern manual you were given by the candidate’s staff, scan that sucker in, and email it to us. Anonymity guaranteed.
On May 5, 2010, Gawker received an unsolicited intern application letter from a woman who billed herself as “The (Potential) Intern From Heaven?” Her name was Leah Beckmann.
Missouri’s Speaker of the House, Republican John Diehl, is currently embroiled in a scandal after allegedly exchanging sexts with a college freshman intern who had him in her phone as “Frank Underwood ;).” The Kansas City Star has obtained and verified screenshots of their :kiss emoji: iMessage conversations, which “paint a picture of playful sexual innuendo.” That is certainly one way you could put it.
Last year, two former interns at magazines owned by Condé Nast filed a class-action lawsuit against the company for underpaying them and thousands of other interns, in violation of labor law. According to recent court filings reported by Reuters, Condé intends to retroactively compensate the pair and over 7,000 other former interns in order to settle the legal dispute. The price tag: $5.8 million.
Panic over the undetermined future of the millenial class continues as the New York Times reports on the overwhelming number of the post-graduate set who are still toiling at unpaid internships. Taking on two, sometimes three internships with no pay, many fear that interning has become its own career path, instead of a bridge to solid employment. As Alex Williams reports:
In his latest insta-classic remote segment, Conan O'Brien comes down off his late night throne to mingle with his lowly interns — and things get weird in a hurry.
Washington, D.C. interns — in particular, congressional interns — tend to be embryonic versions of the monsters they serve: rich, white, and drunk on even the tiniest modicum of actual power. How do they get that way? In part by carefully attending to the advice contained in the “2013 Intern Manual” distributed to the unpaid peons of House Speaker John Boehner, the 12-term Republican who superintends the lower chamber’s extreme right wing. Left behind at a recent D.C. house party by a sauced Hill staffer, the manual shows how even the lowest employees lubricate the capital’s gilded political machine.
Magazine conglomerate Condé Nast, which was slapped with a lawsuit in June for paying interns less than a dollar per hour, has decided to stop paying interns altogether. Zero. Several recent Conde interns told the Who Pays Interns Tumblr, which documents the internship wages at media companies, that their employer has stopped dispensing any kind of stipend (Previously, interns received $550 per semester.)
The National Transportation Safety Board issued a press release this evening acknowledging that a summer intern had erroneously confirmed four fake Asiana pilot names to Bay Area TV station KTVU. The release corroborates KTVU's claim that an NTSB official had confirmed that "Ho Lee Fuk" and "Sum Ting Wong," among others, had been manning Asiana flight 214, which crashed near San Francisco on Saturday.
One day after a woman was fatally attacked by lions while having sex with her boyfriend, another young woman was killed by a lion in an animal sanctuary in California. The woman, a 26-year-old volunteer intern at the Project Survival's Cat Haven in Dunlap, California, somehow found herself inside the enclosure for an 350-pound adult lion named Cous Cous, who CNN described as sort of a "celebrity cat."
Unpaid internships are controversial. "Workplace experience, invaluable connections, blah blah," say the employers. "You fired your lowest-wage workers and now you have us doing their menial jobs which have nothing to do with 'education,'" say the actual interns. All sides should be able to agree on this: unpaid internships—essentially part time jobs that pay nothing—are an incredible hardship for students without money, thereby tilting the playing field wildly in favor of students with money (as if they needed any more help).
Today you all learned that we here at Gawker are looking for a trio of slaves to spend their days with us in terrible, seemingly endless servitude. Who among you is up for such a task? According to one commenter, we should immediately disqualify the eight Horsemen of the Apocalypse you see pictured below.
