ROSS PERLIN is a writer and linguist based in Brooklyn. He has written on forgotten histories and disappearing languages in the U.S., China, and the former Soviet Union. His first book, Intern Nation, was published by Verso in 2011. 

Intern Nation is now out as an updated paperback and ebook, and Ross is available to speak at your school or community event during the Spring and Fall of 2012. 

Besides talking about internships, Ross is also speaking about the rise of "precarious labor" more broadly over the last three decades--how freelancers, indpendent contractors, temps, and others have come to make up a third of the American workforce, and the massive consequences of that shift from Main Street to Occupy Wall Street. 

You can contact Ross at ross DOT perlin AT gmail DOT com.
INTERN NATION: How to Learn Nothing and Earn Little in the Brave New Economy

Authors@Google Talk



Relevant articles:

Five Myths About Interns (Washington Post)

(The New York Times)

(The Harvard Business Review)

(The Guardian, UK) 


How have internships become almost as important as a college degree?
Why are prestigious internships routinely being auctioned off for thousands of dollars?
Why does Disney World in Orlando employ up to 8,000 interns through its College Program every year?

Over the last four years, I've been researching the rise of internships in the modern workplace. The results are inside Intern Nation: the first book aimed at a general readership documenting and analyzing this major new practice of the white-collar workplace and rite of passage for young people. The book draws on the stories of dozens of individual interns and on the testimony of employers, educators, economists, and labor experts, covering the economic impact of internships, their role in young people's lives, the social inequalities they perpetuate, and their effect on particular industries.



Other Writings
  • China's Instant Cities, Thirty Years On (Lapham's Quarterly, November 2010)
    Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Dongguan: instant dystopias or models of eco-dense 21st century living?; the political usefulness of instant cities; the possibility of a City Beautiful movement, or at least an Age of Maintenance and Repair in China's cities

  • Riding the Godless Express (Lapham's Quarterly, February 2010)
    • a capsule history of the largest atheist movement in history: the Soviet war on God waged in the 1920s and 1930s; the rise of the League of the Militant Godless, five million strong; the conversion of churches into Museums of Religion.
  • Letter from Motor City (Open Democracy, June 2009)
    a journey through Detroit under the shadow of Big Three bankruptcy; the rise of techno, urban farming and guerrilla art projects in the abandoned streets of a former industrial powerhouse

  • China and California: Clean Energy Comrades (Chinadialogue, May 2008)
    innovative and unusual collaborations between the world's fastest growing economy and the Silicon Valley nerve centers of green technology; energy efficiency advice channeled from Berkeley to Beijing; the growth of academic and non-profit efforts
  • A Beautiful Moment in Ladino's Twilight Hour (The Jewish Chronicle, May 2008)
    winner of the Bermant Prize at London's Jewish Book Week; Aleksander Ben Ghiat's Ladino translation of Gulliver's Travels; the miraculous last-minute networks of diaspora

  • A Moneymaking Water Pump (Time Magazine, 2006)
    the MoneyMaker Hip Pump, a hand-operated micro-irrigation pump, produced by San Francisco non-profit KickStart, provides an affordable leg up for Africa's poor farmers

  • פארשן פארשװונדענע שפראכן (Yiddish Forward, 2009)
    researching endangered languages in China (in Yiddish)

  • My Olmsted (unpublished non-fiction, 2009)
    through 22 years and 4 landscapes, the author's debt to Frederick Law Olmsted

  • Corporate Culture (unpublished short story, 2008)
    "The Company logo once belonged to the Maramba tribe of the Lower Sepik River..."
Yiddish TV from China     דער ניו-יארקער ייד אין כינע   
Photostream (including the festivals of Brooklyn, the antiquities of Turkey, the oases of Morocco, the rivers of China...)


More journalism here.
More experimental counterfictionals here.
Scholia here.


  This work is under a Creative Commons license. Last updated: 2 May 2012.