Nothing says rock ‘n’ roll like having daddy buy you an internship:

In the Jan. 28 Wall Street Journal, Sue Shellenbarger reports that the selling of internships has blossomed into a cottage industry. There’s no mention of private schools—is it too much to hope that the earlier Journal piece shamed them out of it?—but other charities now auction off internships routinely. Web sites aggregate these auctions for the bidder’s convenience. At CharityFolks.com, the current bid on a semester-long internship at ID-PR, a “public-relations powerhouse,” is $2,500. (“Get your foot in the door today!”) Or maybe you’d like to “jump start your career in the music industry” with an internship at Atlantic Records, cradle of rhythm and blues (a genre nursed largely without help from career-minded collegians). Next bid: $2,500. Proceeds from the sale of both internships go to the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, where equality apparently must take a back seat to freedom. On CharityBuzz.com, I’m sorry to report, the bidding on an internship with fashion designer Caroline Herrera (proceeds to New York University Hospital for Joint Diseases) is already closed, as it is on an internship with Rolling Stone magazine (proceeds: New York Restoration Project).