If the United States no longer functions as a paradigm of prosperity, then what does a 21st-century superpower look like? For Tom Scocca, managing editor for the sports site Deadspin, the answer is Beijing. One part memoir, three parts sociological study, his new book, “Beijing Welcomes You,” offers a wildly ambitious portrait of a city at a crossroads in history. By looking at Beijing’s preparations for the 2008 Summer Games and the stunning pace of its transformation, Scocca reveals how China has emerged not only as the country of the future, but of the present as well.

Over the phone, we discussed the nation’s civil rights policies, its weather manipulation — and what its ascension means for us.

Why do you think it’s important for Americans to understand the modernization of China?

The size of China and the complexity that goes with it are things that people in the United States need to understand and appreciate. The country is such a substantial fraction of everyone and everything on earth that it challenges our belief about what progress means. One of the big, underlying questions about China that Americans are contemplating at this moment in history is whether or not our ideas of the good life are scalable. Not only have we lived in a condition of great wealth and prosperity, we’ve also managed to export our consumer culture and its byproducts to the rest of the world. Now, the factory air blows back across the Pacific to us (although maybe not as much as it blows over the people of Beijing). We also have to question our cherished belief that human rights naturally follow progress and prosperity. It’s clear that China is trying to improve its citizens’ material quality of life without the accompanying political liberalization. So far, they’ve done a lot better than we thought they could.

Your book focuses on Beijing during the build-up to the 2008 Summer Games. Why does that city offer such a good lens through which to view contemporary China?

I concentrated on the redevelopment of Beijing because I thought it represented the country’s ideas about growth and development. The Chinese accomplished a spectacular feat of modernization in less than a decade without ever really loosening their political rule. Security, stability and the desire to control a major corporate event ultimately won out. This isn’t all that inconsistent with the history of the Olympics — the best example being the ’68 Summer Games, which was immediately preceded by the Mexican government gunning down student protestors in a public square.

The city was transformed by the process of preparing for the games. I think what distinguished Beijing from a lot of other Olympic hosts was that it had a whole program of redevelopment and infrastructure building that was going to happen anyway. The Summer Games simply gave the city a timetable and a sense of narrative coherence.

What were some of the more ambitious city-wide initiatives that you observed?

When I arrived in Beijing in 2004, it was in an unbelievably dynamic and comprehensive state of change. Whole streets and neighborhoods would vanish from one week to the next. It wasn’t so much a case of the old making way for the new as much as the new making way for the newer. On top of the projects related to the Summer Games — the construction of the Olympic Green, the Water Cube, etc. — the business district that houses buildings like the headquarters for the China Central Television offices and the World Trade Center Tower #3 was being completely redeveloped. It’s rare that the tallest building in a city [the World Trade Center Tower] becomes a total afterthought. On top of this, Beijing had a massive overhaul of its public transportation system. I’ve lost track of exactly how many subway lines the city has now, but the numbers tripled and quadrupled over the course of a few years.

What lessons can we as Americans extract from this? Does the revitalization of Beijing provide us with a blueprint for urban renewal, or maybe a glimpse into how our cities will be rebuilt if we ever default on our debt to the Chinese?

I do think Beijing’s redevelopment raises important questions about what the United States wants to accomplish and what kind of price it’s willing to pay for progress. Just this week, China’s incredibly ambitious rail program was revealed to be perhaps too ambitious and dynamic. Ideally, you don’t want your high speed trains to crash into one another.

For better or worse, I think the Chinese are much more willing to embrace change. They have much less regard for individual property rights, and Americans are lucky that we live in a country where developers don’t have the power to remake our cities out from under our feet. Part of what attracted me to the subject of Beijing is that it offered a sense of endless possibility. People moved there from all over China because they thought that they could start things, do things and make things. Whether we’re debating our infrastructure or our healthcare system, there’s this pervasive feeling of stasis in the United States. Any kind of change is perceived as a change for the worse.

How do you explain China’s seemingly insatiable appetite for advancement?

I don’t think this desire for change necessarily arose from the people wanting it — at least not in the form it often takes. Most of the country probably could have done without the turmoil of the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution. Unlike Americans, I think the Chinese have seen so much change in their lives that they’ve grown accustomed to it as a basic element of existence. And their standards of living have gone up. No one would ever want to be born as a Chinese peasant, but you’re better off being a Chinese peasant now than at any other juncture in history. Of course, with these improved standards of living have come staggering rates of pollution.

Do you think the West is justified in its criticism of the country’s industrialization?

The Chinese response, which is a compelling one, is that the West did the same thing during its periods of growth. When America and Britain industrialized, they poisoned their air and their water until they eventually became rich enough to afford healthier emissions standards. When you factor in the health of the planet, however, the scales change radically. There’s a big difference between burying China and the British Isles in a cloud of smog. I’m not sure the Chinese can afford to keep breaking eggs for the omelette of prosperity. There might not ultimately be enough eggs. I do think that this is one of those situations where it’s a mistake to think of China as a monolithic power instead of a set of overlapping bureacracies with conflicting ambitions. It’s not that China’s leadership doesn’t recognize that the environment is a serious problem, but the economic incentives [to maintain current rates of production] are still far too great.

China is at the forefront of the new science of weather manipulation. Why are they so interested in it?

It’s really not all that new, it’s just that the United States never decided to pursue it. The scientific underpinnings of this practice are debatable, but the Chinese believe that they’re able to remove excess moisture from their clouds by blasting them with rockets of silver iodide. This compound produces condensation nuclei that create droplets of water that are heavy enough to fall. During the Summer Games, they actually tried to make the clouds rain themselves out before they reached the Olympic Stadium for the opening ceremonies. Government officials claimed they successfully intercepted these storms and maybe they did. The irony is that human activity is already strongly affecting the Chinese weather. By wringing more water out of their clouds, China is trying to undo [the rain-inhibiting effects of] its own smog.

Reading your book, I was surprised — perhaps naively — to see how much Chinese popular culture offers a funhouse mirror of our own. During the run-up to the 2008 Summer Games, I remember seeing the Olympic team’s cheerleaders dance to Tag Team’s “Whoop There It Is.”

Well, America did invent the jock jam — a genre the entire world seems to enjoy. Obviously, we’re one of the planet’s largest exporters of music, film and television. With that said, there are certain barriers that reduce our cultural influence in China. Chinese law limits the number of foreign movies that can be shown each year. This also accounts for the country’s thriving bootleg market, where people can purchase DVD material that wouldn’t otherwise be available to the public. I think the Chinese probably hold their ground against American pop culture better than most other countries in the world do.

There’s a section of “Beijing Welcomes You” where you examine some of the Chinese separatist movements. Why do you think the United States pays so much more attention to Tibet than the Muslims in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Maybe I’ve answered my own question.

Tibet’s position in Western consciousness can probably be traced to a midcentury fascination with Tibetan spiritualism. Most people don’t understand how small the region’s population is compared to the rest of China. The Chinese tend to view this independence movement as a small issue that’s been blown up into something much bigger than it deserves to be. They also look at American history and, not unreasonably, see our indignation as a little hypocritical. As we expanded west with our railroad construction, we sent large numbers of settlers to uproot the indigenous culture — one that comprised a much larger percentage of our country’s inhabitants than the Tibetans in China. [As far as the Uyghur separatists are concerned] I think their Muslim identity offers at least a partial explanation of why they get so much less press in the United States. As a matter of foreign policy, we’re probably more put out by the Chinese government denouncing the Tibetans as terrorists who need to be suppressed.

As a reporter living and working in China, how difficult was it to operate under the government’s media restrictions? Do you think your access to information was more or less limited as a foreign national?

I think my access was less limited compared to native journalists. If you’re writing for a Chinese outlet, there are directives from the Central Propaganda Ministry about what you can and can’t publish. While reporters were given very specific guidelines about how they could cover the recent railway accident, they basically had free rein to write whatever they desired about Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. Reporting in China is a very different experience from reporting in the United States. I never had more than a 90-day visa, so I was always aware of how quickly I could be forced to leave the country. Because I wasn’t working as a foreign correspondent, it was always a mystery to me whether Chinese officials were actually reading my dispatches. I did manage to write a piece for one of Beijing’s official publications during my time there. Only after it ran did I learn that one of the editors had added a very subtle allusion to an old Chinese trope encouraging dissent to flourish.

Are you concerned at all that your book might seem slightly backwards looking?

Given how fast the city is developing, I think it’s almost inevitable with anything you write about Beijing. My hope is that the book presents a self-contained episode of transformation. The 2008 Summer Games was both a rehearsal for, and an introduction to the future of China.

As astronomy author Bob Berman’s new book reveals, storms like these are actually a common byproduct of the Sun’s 11-year cycle of pulsing, dimming and brightening. “The Sun’s Heartbeat,” which takes its title from this phenomenon, offers a compelling and surprisingly playful history of the Milky Way’s most famous star — from the alternately brilliant and misguided theories of the ancient Greeks, to the modern-day discoveries that would make Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick blush. Along the way, Berman, a columnist for Astronomy magazine and the science editor of the Old Farmer’s Almanac, examines how solar cycles can offset global warming and how mankind has, by its own ambitions and neuroses, devolved into a collection of sun-starved troglodytes.

Over the phone, we discussed what the sun’s cycles mean for global warning, what role it plays in our food shortages — and why its rays actually prevent cancer.

What kind of effect does the sun’s heartbeat have on our planet and its inhabitants?

The effects are myriad, but one of the things this pulsing is responsible for is “coronal mass ejections” — bursts of solar wind, light isotope plasma and magnetic fields that are known to wreak havoc on our electrical lines. In 2008, an all-star, U.S. government panel very frighteningly predicted that a strong storm like the ones we had in 1859 and 1921 could potentially destroy our power grid. Then, of course, you’ve got polar-orbiting satellites and GPS systems that are vulnerable along with a space station where astronauts could be subjected to high levels of radiation. Even commercial airline passengers flying polar routes could be at risk.

How concerned should we really be about solar wind storms? What is the likelihood of one hitting us directly?

It will definitely happen in the next century. Judging from the dates of the last big storms, we’re probably overdue.

There have been plans over the years to overhaul our power grid, but I haven’t heard nearly as much about initiatives to shield against a solar weather event. Given the potential financial ramifications, why do you think this issue gets so little attention from politicians? Are there any preventative measures we could even take?

Experts often refer to these kinds of storms as “low frequency-high impact” events, which don’t tend to call the public’s attention until they’re actually happening. The irony is that serious storms — ones that can cause cascading power failures, blackouts and, potentially, harm to airline passengers and astronauts — happen almost every solar cycle and people still remain oblivious. While they’ll never bring us to the brink of apocalypse, they’re certainly something that the public should take note of.

Another factor that might contribute to our general indifference toward these storms is that we’re almost powerless to protect ourselves from them. Even if we discovered that one was heading right for us, we couldn’t determine the threat it posed until a few hours before it hit. Every blast of material is like a swarm of bees carrying its own magnetic material, except these bees are traveling 500 miles per second, or a thousand times faster than a bullet. It won’t transfer its energy to us, though, unless its magnetic field is aligned opposite planet Earth. I suppose the power grid could be secured in anticipation of a storm, but probably only to an extent and shutdowns could prove costly.

News outlets indicate that we’re mired in the worst global food shortage of the past half-century. Man’s contributions to this crisis have been well-documented, but what kind of role does the sun’s erratic behavior play in all of this?

There are three major factors that affect the planet’s temperature and, by extension, its agricultural development: volcanic activity, the presence or absence of El Niño and, finally, the heartbeat of the sun. If the latter slows down for long periods of time, the Earth gets colder. During the Maunder Minimum from 1645 to 1715, the sun effectively lost its heartbeat entirely. The result was unbearably cold winters and incredible hardship around the world.

Carbon emissions have warmed the planet dramatically, but we happen to be entering a new sunspot [i.e., heartbeat] cycle — the 24th in our recorded history. Many experts believe that not only will it have weak maximum temperatures, but very deep minimums. If this is true, it’s the best thing that can possibly happen. The sun would effectively buy us time to switch over to non-fossil fuels. If we end up having strong or even normal maximums, temperatures in 2015 could be hotter than humans have ever seen before.

I’m guessing that skeptics of global warming have willfully ignored this research.

They have, and to our great peril. The fact that the sun has kept global warming down over the last 10 years has given some people an excuse to declare that it simply doesn’t exist.

Do we know how long this dimming period might last?

It’s impossible to predict. One of the origins of this phenomenon comes from a part of the sun that we didn’t even know existed until only a few years ago. Few people realize that there’s a sun inside the sun.

What function does it serve?

Actually, it’s the innermost 10 percent that generates all of its power. The equivalent of 96 million hydrogen bombs explode there every second, creating the fusion that produces all of the energy and neutrinos that hit us here on Earth. The sun’s core, which is shaped like a ball despite the fact that it’s not entirely solid, completes its rotation over the course of a 27-day period. Magnetic fields are generated approximately 70 percent of the solar radius’ distance away from the star’s center. For the remaining 30 percent, the sun’s latitudes are wildly irregular. The equator takes the same four weeks to spin, but the poles run closer to 32 days. The different layers of the sun brushing past each other creates an area of violent reactions. Everything we see on the solar surface — the flares and streaks — all have their origin in the zone between these two layers.

Why do we register the sun’s light as white?

The sun emits all of the spectral colors — the most important being red, blue and green. By observing these three colors in varying amounts, our eyes and brains enable us to perceive all the others. Green light is actually the sun’s peak emission. This tends to surprise people as many would believe that it gives off more heat, ultraviolet rays or X-rays. Our eyes are actually designed so that when we see green light together with the other colors of the sun, we’ll always perceive them as white. Any other color that we view around us means that that light source is being reflected. Grass and leaves look green, for example, because plant life prefers blue to green light.

In a chapter titled “The Sun Will Save Your Life,” you discuss the possible connection between autism and vitamin D deficiency. I was wondering if you could expand on that a little.

This is a fairly new study. There were two articles, one in Scientific American and the other in a Swedish journal, that presented compelling evidence that low vitamin D levels in pregnant mothers can be one of the triggers for this heartbreaking affliction. Unfortunately, a lot of autism groups still blame vaccinations even though this explanation really isn’t being borne out scientifically.

In what ways is the public misinformed about the dangers of sun exposure and how did we go astray?

Dr. John Canell, whom I interviewed for the book and is a council member for a nonprofit group of physicians studying the health effects of vitamin D, argues that we’re the first [modern] generation of cave people. Nature intended for man to take in a lot of sunlight. For proof, one need look no further than the statistic revealing that 10-15 minutes of sunbathing will provide us with the same amount of vitamin D as 200 glasses of milk. And this vitamin is one of our most potent anti-cancer agents. I think we started running into trouble when we shifted away from an outdoor, agricultural society to an indoor, manufacturing one.

The second blow was the invention of the air conditioner, which insured that everyone kept his or her windows closed. Window glass completely blocks out the ultraviolet rays that enable our bodies to manufacture vitamin D. Unfortunately for kids, I think the final straw has been the computer and video-game craze of the last 30 years. Unlike past generations, children today spend a lot more time indoors than they do playing around in the sun. Testing shows that our vitamin D levels are now a small fraction of what we think they were 100 years ago. These kinds of tests weren’t administered back then, so there’s no way for us to know for sure.

So does this mean the cast of “The Jersey Shore” is less likely to develop melanoma?

Ultimately, everybody knows how much sun they can safely take in. You really should try not to burn, especially if you have blue eyes, fair skin and red or blond hair. Melanoma claims approximately 9,000 lives in the U.S. per year, which is worrisome, but it’s also worth noting that upward of 250,000 lives could be saved from cancer-related illnesses if people had the proper amount of vitamin D in their bloodstreams. It’s better to get too much sun than too little.

In his new book, “Rat Island: Predators in Paradise and the World’s Greatest Wildlife Rescue,” wildlife writer William Stolzenburg reveals that these feral little beasts, most of which have been introduced to the islands by man, are destroying native bird populations one pilfered egg at a time. The stakes are higher than they may appear. Many of these rodent transplants threaten to drive several species to extinction and quicken our planet’s already rapid rate of biotic impoverishment. Stolzenburg offers a fascinating, if occasionally grisly, peek into the emerging science of preservation through eradication, as conservationists scattered across the five oceans have begun independent campaigns to save their islands’ endangered species from one of our greatest biological weapons: the rat.

Over the phone, we discussed the ethics of extermination, the ways in which rodents (even rats) are often misunderstood — and the perilous state of our planet’s biodiversity.

Where is Rat Island and how did it earn the moniker?

Rat Island is a real place that exists in the Aleutians. A couple of centuries ago, a shipwrecked rodent or two swam ashore, and they’ve pretty much been eating their way through the island ever since. When conservationists began focusing their attentions on the archipelago, they decided this would be the first of the Aleutians [rat populations] they’d try to exterminate. There are many different islands in the area that are infested, but for logistical purposes, it stood out as the best target to make their first rat eradication experiment.

At this point, most people have come to terms with the idea that our ecosystems have been compromised in one way or another. Why should we care about these islands?

By compromised, I assume you mean altered by humans. It’s true that we’ve left our footprint, either directly or indirectly, on every habitable speck of earth. We’ve triggered ecological chain reactions by our obliteration of species, and we’ve touched every organism on the planet through our radical modification of the atmosphere. But just because it’s too late to avoid leaving a footprint, it doesn’t mean we can’t try to tread more lightly. There’s a difference between stepping and stomping. These islands are important because they harbor nearly half the planet’s roster of endangered species on just 5 percent of its landmass. And finally, we should care about these exterminations for the sake of our own moral compass. Most of us may never have the supreme fortune of meeting the inimitable kiwi, or witnessing the otherworldly flight of a million auklets on Kiska Island. But both are miracles that will leave the world and every human soul spiritually poorer by their absence.

What do these eradication campaigns tell us about the global state of biodiversity?

I see Rat Island as a hope and a harbinger for the larger world we’ve been tampering with. Until recently, its silence has functioned as a kind of metaphor for the growing number of extinctions that have been sweeping the planet. People need to be cognizant of the fact that we’re destroying life forms at a breakneck pace. We’re up against the wall, and we’re going to have to take some unpleasant measures to restore what’s been lost.

How do the ecological threats posed by rats compare to natural disasters like the Exxon Valdez or BP oil spills?

People who have devoted their lives to this kind of research seem to think the rat is far worse. However bad an oil spill may be, things can repair themselves over time. The curse of the rat is eternal; once it’s found its way to an island, it will eat and breed until it’s completely destroyed the seabird populations that nest ashore.

Why are we so terrified of rats?

I’ve asked that question myself and never gotten a satisfactory answer. We tend to fear big carnivores because there was a time in our evolution when these were our central predators. There’s still a lot of guesswork going on with the rat. I think some of it is an inherited psychological trauma that dates back to the Black Plague. When a disease wipes out a third of the planet’s population, you tend to sit up and take notice of its carriers. Part of the fear and disgust is cultural. Fairly or not, the rat has become the symbol of inner-city poverty because the poor and the homeless are the ones who are typically bitten. Aesthetically, I know a lot of people have problems with the naked tail.

Far be it from me to try and defend the little sucker, but is it possible that the rat gets a bad rep?

Researching the book, I’ve found rats to be smart and curious creatures with a number of redeeming qualities. In one of the studies I reference, biopsychologists hooked their rodent subjects up to a set of sensors that could record certain squeaks that were too high-pitched for the human ear to detect. They had lab researchers reach into the cages and play with the rats, rolling them over repeatedly and generally tickling them all over. Sure enough, they discovered the high-pitched squeals to be joyful shrieks of laughter. An article about the experiment appeared in the scientific press describing the noises as expressions of joy, an emotion that was previously only associated with higher animals like chimps and dogs. The study is a reminder to those who are killing tens of thousands of rats in these campaigns that extermination is not a job they should be taking lightly. These invaders are sentient, feeling creatures that did not choose their villain’s role. We set them up, and now we’re gunning them down. It may be our moral duty to exterminate these creatures, but it’s also our responsibility to do so with respect and the least amount of suffering we can provide them.

How did this idea of violently eradicating alien invaders come about?

It really didn’t start taking form until the 1970s or ’80s, when people realized it could make a serious impact on an island’s ecosystem. Before that, it was assumed that once you had rats or other invasive predators, you were pretty much stuck with them. It all began with the development of a new poison called brodifacoum, a second generation of [anticoagulant] warfarin that was used to treat human patients for thrombosis. Chemists realized that if you fed too much of this anticoagulant to a person, they would bleed to death internally. They said to themselves: “Aha! I bet we could turn this on the rats.” Once they figured out how to make a really good rat poison, they started learning how to use it on the smaller islands of New Zealand. They began by laying bait on little, three-acre plots and have since graduated to helicopters that can coat much larger territories. Lo and behold, they found that they could destroy an island’s entire rat population.

Why is the rat’s extermination so vital to the survival of fauna on archipelagos like the Aleutians and New Zealand?

Most of the creatures that have evolved on these islands have done so in isolation. This means few competitors and even fewer predators. After several generations, birds like the kakapo in New Zealand eventually had no more use for their wings and became flightless. As a result, they’ve become incredibly susceptible to island predators. Many of these sea birds came to these archipelagos so they could raise their chicks without having to worry about the threat of rodents, felines and canids. The ocean waters offered an impenetrable wall of protection. The arrival of man and his accompanying critters has completely transformed the ecology of these islands.

But mass killings? Isn’t there a more humane alternative, like introducing a natural predator to offset some of the damage caused by these animals?

The fear is that experiments like these tend to throw gasoline on the fire. It might seem like a decent idea to put animals like weasels on islands with small rats, but rats can be pretty testy adversaries. It wouldn’t take long for a predator to realize that there’s much easier prey to pursue — usually the very species conservationists are trying to protect. Scientists tend to shy away from these forms of biological control because the risk for an embarrassing backfire is extremely high.

How have organizations like PETA responded to these kinds of initiatives?

I don’t think that PETA gets so upset any more about these animals. If you’re a nonprofit trying to grow support for your organization, the rat just doesn’t make a good poster image for a rescue initiative. They do tend to take issue with the killing and poisoning of cats. On St. Nicholas Island, which I neglected to mention in my book, conservationists rounded up feral felines by nonlethal means in order to satisfy PETA. Ultimately, animal rights organizations are a lot more vocal with their complaints about eradication when they involve a creature that’s more appealing to the general public.

Taking all of this into account, why is the rat’s claim to these islands any less valuable than that of the birds? Aren’t we interfering with the process of natural selection? I like a kiwi and a kakapo as much as the next guy, but what if it’s their time to go?

You can call these eradications instances of man playing god, but so was our arrival on these archipelagos in the first place. The very fact that these interlopers have become living, thriving islanders is evidence of our meddling. Conservationists who have taken it upon themselves to do something about it have come to the conclusion that drastic times call for drastic measures. They realize that we risk losing several life forms that have been thousands of years in the making at the expense of an animal that’s global in distribution and clearly going to be around no matter what. Speaking for the exterminators, if conservationists and biologists sit back and let these rats take over, they’ll be abdicating their duty to defend the diversity of life on Earth.

I know the set of concerns is very different, but can you ever envision exterminations like these taking place in a major metropolis?

Rats are mainland animals, so while they pose a risk of human injury, chances are that they’re not causing all that much ecological damage to a city. Whether or not it would be worth a broad scale measure to eradicate these creatures becomes more of a societal question than an environmental one. On an island, you know that you can wipe out an entire animal population. Success on the mainland can be a little harder to gauge. The other thing to note about these exterminations is that they usually take place on locations that aren’t very heavily populated. People tend to blanch at the prospect of having helicopters dumping big loads of poison on their heads.

In his new book “Intern Nation,” an exhaustive examination of the intern’s insidious new role in the working world, author Ross Perlin questions whether this kind of bartering should be a professional rite of passage. By his estimation, nearly half of this country’s internships are illegal under the Fair Labor Standards Act, and still the cubicles of corporate America remain packed with trainees champing at their wireless headsets for a chance to have their labor exploited in the name of networking and résumé-boosting. [Ed. note: Salon considers its limited use of unpaid interns to be legal.] Are interns simply paying their dues, or have they been hoodwinked by a culture that seems to trade in low self-esteem? Is there any hope for reform? To answer these questions, Salon sat down with the “Intern Nation” author at the Flying Saucer Cafe in Brooklyn. Perlin, a graduate of Stanford, SOAS and Cambridge, has written for such publications as Time, Lapham’s Quarterly and Open Democracy. Over coffee, we discussed the tragicomedy of the modern internship.

When did internships begin and how have they evolved?

The concept of the “intern” dates back to the Civil War. Through World War II and into the 1950s, the title was associated almost exclusively with medical students and aspiring doctors. I talk about that history a little in my book, but I’m really more interested in the internship boom of the last 30-40 years, when the term spread into just about every white-collar profession — for-profit and nonprofit, public and private sector. By now, it’s become standard operating procedure that every company has an internship program. The reasons are complicated, but they have to do with businesses trying to save money on labor cost, young people feeling pressured to “credential” themselves, and colleges and universities radically changing their academic policies. 

Was there a tipping point when the internship became the new apprenticeship?

I’m reluctant to point to any individual moment in history because there’s no single person or organization pushing internships. As far as our cultural awareness of them is concerned, you could make a compelling argument that the Monica Lewinsky scandal was a kind of tipping point. In many ways, she was a typical intern. She wasn’t protected in the workplace from sexual harassment, and she was on her second internship in the White House — one she’d secured through personal connections. In fact, the circumstances under which she and the president came into such close contact were due in large part to the government shutdown of 1995, when full-time workers were sent home. Interns were being used as a kind of flexible, sub-labor force. The same holds true today.

Given how nebulous the intern title has become, why does it still hold so much cachet with both employers and aspiring professionals?

What’s curious about interns is that they’re simultaneously privileged and exploited. They’re privileged because internships, coupled with a four-year degree, have become the principal way into the white-collar workforce. Those who can’t access these opportunities, people who need to work full-time paid jobs to support themselves, have a lot of trouble breaking into industries like politics, entertainment and the arts, where internships are a barrier to entry. They’re exploited, of course, because they often have to offer their labor for free. I think the title’s cachet stems in large part from the perception that interns come from privileged backgrounds. There’s also this notion that while they’re at the bottom of the totem pole now, interns are on a trajectory to one day become employers themselves.

We’ll come back to this notion of privilege, but why do you think the internship model is broken? Is this a byproduct of the recession?

Internships used to be paid gigs at blue-chip companies that focused on training and recruitment. It was considered a marker of a good internship program that it hired between 50 and 70 percent of its workers to full-time jobs. Today, people sometimes have to do five or six internships in order to land the work they’re ultimately looking for. You also have a number of companies that are freezing future hires or simply replacing their paid employees with interns. The recession has definitely exacerbated the problem. According to one study, there was a 21 percent drop in paid internships after the economic crisis began in 2008. We’re at a turning point where the traditional use of these jobs as humane, white-collar apprenticeships and recruiting tools is being phased out. As a result, the violations of labor law are becoming more and more egregious.

What makes an internship illegal?

The law’s not that well-known. I certainly didn’t know it when I did my unpaid internship six years ago. Part of the problem is that there are almost no new employment laws being made, so we often have to refer back to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 — a crucial piece of legislation that effectively ended child labor, helped set up the minimum wage in the U.S., and required employers to pay their workers overtime. Twelve years after it was passed, the Supreme Court made a ruling that modified the act to allow for unpaid training situations if a job met a certain set of criteria. Because they’re viewed as a kind of trainee, interns today are held to the same standards by the Department of Labor. Unfortunately, few of these internships actually pass the test. One of the most frequently violated conditions states that the trainee should provide no immediate advantage to his or her employer. Whether it means making Xeroxes or writing speeches for senators, interns are always expected to contribute to the bottom line.

If that’s the case, why do you think so many companies leave themselves so vulnerable to possible lawsuits?

Either they themselves don’t know the law, or they assume these contracts have loopholes that are big enough to wiggle through. In many cases, internships get started informally without the approval of a company’s H.R. department (assuming, of course, the company is big enough to have one). Many people feel, “Well, this is what everyone’s doing.” As awareness of the law spreads, companies will need to start thinking about things like back pay and bad publicity.

Given how many illegal interns there are out there, how come so few seem willing to take their grievances to court?

I think a lot of people are afraid to go after an employer they’re hoping might write them a letter of recommendation or offer them a job. Many of my research subjects felt that all they got out of their internship was the goodwill they managed to accrue. Throwing this away on a lawsuit that might not even net them all that much money hardly seems worth it. Mostly, though, I think young people today have very little awareness of labor issues. They simply accept that this is the way the world works.

Do you think this is a distinctly American phenomenon?

The internship craze certainly began here. I also think the intern’s mindset is a reflection of how we as a society think about our work and our careers — this idea that we have to pay our dues and make sacrifices to get ahead. The reception of internships by young people in Western Europe has been a lot chillier, but these jobs have become quite pervasive there in the last 10 to 20 years.

How are academic institutions complicit in all of this?

This is another big difference between the U.S. and the rest of the developed world. The internship boom in other countries has largely been a matter of companies interacting with young people. Internships are a way for them to attract future employees. In the U.S., schools have been a lot more involved in the process. Since the early 20th century, our educators have been smitten with the idea that they need to go beyond the classroom to connect their students to the workplace. In my book, I talk about something called cooperative education, which was kind of a proto-internship model that made professional work part of a student’s learning experience. Of late, however, schools have started using internships as a means of outsourcing their education altogether. By offering course credit, colleges and universities are effectively charging their students to work off campus for free.

So the promise of academic credit doesn’t guarantee an internship’s legality?

A spokesman for the Department of Labor has explicitly said that it does not. Academic credit might be viewed as a mitigating factor if the school has made a good-faith effort to monitor these internships, but my research shows that most colleges and universities are pretty lax in their supervision.

Reading your book, I was shocked to learn that more than 75 percent of unpaid interns are women. What do you make of that?

The benign explanation is that the fields of study to which women are drawn — humanities and social sciences — don’t typically offer paid internships. With that said, I do think this statistic lends itself to a more sinister interpretation. Employers may see that the majority of incoming interns are women and feel that they’ll be more accepting of whatever economic conditions they put forth. Maybe they think an intern’s parents are more willing to support a daughter than they are a son.

“Intern Nation” consistently champions the cause of all unpaid interns, but are they really deserving of our sympathy? The majority of them understand what they’re signing up for, and you yourself admit that only the most privileged can afford to take these jobs in the first place.

First off, I believe it’s something of a myth that all interns are rich kids. Outside of the glamour fields of arts and entertainment, the vast majority of them actually come from middle-class and lower-income backgrounds. Ultimately, however, it’s more than just the unpaid interns who are being cheated by this system. I’d like to think that I’m also championing the cause of the non-interns, whether they’re community college kids who can’t afford to work for free, high school graduates who’ve been told that an internship is only open to college students, or even people in their 30s who can’t break in to certain industries because they don’t come from the right background. As a society, we need to start asking ourselves: How do you become a politician, or a film producer, or an Op-Ed writer at a major newspaper? Increasingly, we’re seeing that former interns are dominating these positions because at a crucial stage in their careers, they had the resources to endure a period of unpaid work. The bottom of the social ladder shouldn’t have to make such a tremendous sacrifice.

Later in the book, you talk about the similarity between intern and Internet cultures. I was wondering if you could expand on that a little.

From music to news to online search engines, people expect everything on the Internet to be free. In a curious way, I think these expectations have eroded our understanding of what we pay for and what we earn money for. It also bears mentioning that interns are particularly widespread in Silicon Valley start-ups, where their responsibilities are often related to social media — maintaining Twitter feeds, updating Facebook pages, etc. None of these sites cost money to access, and many organizations feel they shouldn’t have to spend money on a labor force to maintain them.

So where do we go from here? Is it even possible to reverse this trend?

We’ve shifted away from this for an assortment of reasons, but I think we need to re-embrace the mentality that work brings reward. Young people have to examine what they’re doing and ask: “Is this something I should be paid for?” I also think parents need to take a long, hard look at themselves in the mirror. In many cases, they’re the ones who are directly or indirectly subsidizing these Fortune 500 companies by lending money to their children. Ultimately, though, I think we ought to start thinking about this more systemically as a matter of public policy. Until legislators begin enforcing the law, this cycle is doomed to repeat itself.

Jacob Sugarman is a Salon editorial fellow.

Yet despite its exponential growth in popularity, many in the artistic community continue to walk over the gaming industry like the Mario Brothers over so many mushrooms. While comic books and children’s toy lines have been immortalized on the silver screen, video game adaptations continue to fall flat (for examples, see: “Evil, Resident 1-4″). Will games ever be able to completely shed their macho-nerd stigma? And as their narratives grow increasingly complex, what kind of claim will they stake on our popular culture?

To answer these questions, we turned to the author of “All Your Base Are Belong to Us,” a game lover’s history of the industry’s most colorful players and companies. Harold Goldberg has written about video gaming for Wired and Entertainment Weekly; his book titles include “My Life Among the Serial Killers,” which he co-wrote with Dr. Helen Morrison, and “Sidney Lumet: Interviews.”

Salon spoke with him over the phone about secrets of Nintendo’s success, the neurological wonders of “Tetris” and the gentler side of “Grand Theft Auto.”

What does the title of your book actually mean?

“All Your Base Are Belong to Us” is a piece of poorly translated text from the opening scene of a Japanese game called “Zero Wing.” Around the year 2000, it became a kind of Internet meme amongst gamers who liked to talk trash with their fellow players. I also think the phrase neatly captures the current video-gaming zeitgeist. Financially and artistically, the industry has really come into its own over the past few decades and it has begun absorbing the audiences of some more established forms of media.

You argue that video games have conquered popular culture, and yet they’re still treated by much of the mainstream media as a kind of ghetto art form. Why do you think that so few people, for example, have even heard of Shigeru Miyamoto, the creative genius behind Nintendo?

While they’ve been around for 50 years, video games are still relatively new compared to a lot of other popular art forms. I think everyone needs to open their minds a little to the medium’s potential. When a game is done right, it can be as engaging as any movie or novel. I’m not suggesting that the authors of video games can be compared to David Foster Wallace, but I think the emotional resonance is the same if the writing isn’t as good. If you spend 100 hours playing “Red Dead Redemption,” the great western from Rockstar Games, you’ll almost feel as though you’ve read a great work of prose. As gamers age and some of them become heavy hitters in the entertainment industry, I think people will begin to realize that this is an art form that needs to be reviewed alongside movies, books and music.

Given how rich their storytelling can be, why do so many video games make such horrendous movie adaptations?

Both industries are suspicious of one another — this is something I’ve been hearing from gaming developers since the mid-’90s. One of the problems is that Hollywood is so focused on brand building that it rarely takes the time to understand what these intellectual properties are all about. Games tend to feature multiple storylines unfolding simultaneously, while the majority of the big summer blockbusters out there are a lot more linear. Television has always seemed to me like a much more natural fit, and I think a network like HBO or Showtime or even AMC could do terrific job of capturing a game’s narrative complexity. With that said, I do think there’s probably a “Social Network”-type movie to be made about some of the more revolutionary gaming designers, many of whom were ahead of their time and experienced great personal tragedy pursuing their vision.

Reading your book, I was reminded how long Nintendo has been kicking around. How has it managed to outlast competitors like Atari and Sega? Is it because products like the Wii provide counterprogramming to some of the more violent games available on PlayStation and other devices?

Agility is the key to survival in this industry, and Nintendo has always found a way to reinvent itself. PlayStation ruled the roost for almost a decade before the Wii came out and changed the face of gaming as we know it. With the various iterations of Wii sports, not only did you have kids and video game junkies like me playing, but entire families. For years after its release, Wii bowling remained enormously successful with older generations of people who had never played before. And while the PC remains the most popular device for female gamers, the Wii is also one of the more gender-friendly consoles on the market.

As a loyal “Super Mario Brothers” player, one question that has always puzzled me is how a Japanese video game manufacturer settled on an Italian-American plumber as its mascot. Any thoughts?

There are lots of different theories floating around, but the popular belief is that Mario was named after the company warehouse’s first landlord in Seattle. I realize that doesn’t offer much explanation as to why he’s a plumber. Popeye had a huge influence on Miyamoto, so it’s possible that the Mario Brothers may have been a riff on a few characters from the cartoon or the original comic strip.

Your book details how some of the first video games were constructed on military contracts. Today, titles like “Medal of Honor” and “Call of Duty” remain some of the industry’s top sellers. Why do you think gaming and war seem to go hand in hand?

I’m not a psychologist, so I can’t say whether or not there’s something ingrained in the human mind that makes us want to shoot or kill. I do know that video games can be extremely empowering. Whether you’re fighting in a fantasy dreamscape or on the beaches of Normandy, you’re always trying to save the world in one form or another. I think guns tend to give gamers a greater feeling of agency than hand-to-hand combat. Early video games like “Spacewar!” also took a lot of their cues from “Flash Gordon” and other works of science fiction where elaborate weaponry is a common trope.

What kind of neurological effects do you think video games have had on the generations that have grown up playing them?

In one of my chapters, I talk a little about how “Tetris” has been shown to improve its players’ brain functions by sharpening their reflexes and decision-making abilities. I think gaming has also radically altered the way that we dream, for better or for worse. When we play a video game for several consecutive hours, its characters and landscapes tend to return to us in our sleep.

How do you think social networking has affected gaming and vice versa?

Even though a company like Zynga is valued at $10 billion, we’re still very early in the evolution of social gaming. I don’t think the games that are available on Facebook are nearly as satisfying as the ones you might find on a console or even a hand-held device. Many of them revolve around micro transactions, so you can play a few hours for free, but eventually you’ll have to pay some kind of fee if you want to progress. To give you an example, I recently started playing a role-playing game that left me trapped in a dungeon with a huge monster I simply couldn’t beat. I finally decided to pay a $5 charge for an energy upgrade and I still couldn’t kill the bastard. What this tells me is that the basic designs of these games may not be strong enough to support the business model they have in place. Facebook also often asks its users to shoehorn their friends into the games they’re playing and this can make a lot of people uncomfortable. Developers need to think more carefully about the gamer experience than they are right now.

You devote an entire chapter of your book to the birth of the “Grand Theft Auto” franchise. The games’ excessive violence has already been well-documented, but what made them so revolutionary?

“Grand Theft Auto” wasn’t the first to do this, but it definitely popularized the idea that you don’t have to complete an ordered sequence of tasks or challenges to play. The game’s universe is so immaculately detailed that you can do just about anything you want. This can mean stealing a fleet of cars or taking your girlfriend on a date to the virtual equivalent of Coney Island. There are even simple, Wii-like sports games embedded inside if you feel like you’re getting bored. “Grand Theft Auto III” was especially groundbreaking because it offered hours upon hours of game play. People really felt like they were getting their money’s worth.

How do you see the video game industry evolving? Is it a foregone conclusion that we’ll be playing in 3-D?

Not only will we be playing in 3-D without special glasses, video game designers have already started branching out into hologram technology. I look forward to the day when I’ll be able to wrap my arms around a projected image of Lara Croft. With all of that said, I still think the grail for designers is to write a video game that’s on par with some of our classic works of fiction. I’d like to think we’re inching closer every day.