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The celebutantes-turned-businesswomen are rebooting the show that provided a blueprint for the past 20 years of reality TV.How would two troubled Los Angeles heiresses manage as members of the Bible Belt working class?The answer helped revolutionize reality TV and legitimized the careers of Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie. In 2003, the pair of 22-year-olds debuted in Fox’s “The Simple Life,” which documented their move to Altus, Ark. to live with a family on their farm and try out blue collar jobs.Hilton and Richie brought rich-girl haughtiness and high jinks to mundane tasks like cleaning hotel rooms and, in one memorable episode, serving burgers at a Sonic Drive-In. The result was a quotable megahit — with heart. “Their fish-out-of-water ineptitude serves as a social leveler that gives them their comeuppance and preserves the dignity of their rural hosts,” Alessandra Stanley wrote in a review for The New York Times. Unlike the other popular reality programs of the time, like “Big Brother” and “Survivor,” the allure of “The Simple Life” didn’t come from a wild premise or shocking competition: The personalities of and friendship between Hilton and Richie were the drawing card. That recipe has been built upon in subsequent reality franchises like “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” “Jersey Shore” and “The Real Housewives.”More than two decades later, the two are appearing in “Paris & Nicole: Encore,” a three-part reboot which is primarily set in L.A. and involves activities and outings a bit closer to home. It will air on Peacock beginning Thursday. Though the show centers on the pair’s staging of an opera based on “sanasa,” a made-up word which fans might remember as a mainstay joke on the original, Hilton and Richie also revisit Altus, Sonic and the friendship that made their show riveting TV.“There was nothing really to compare it to,” Hilton said of “The Simple Life.” “So we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into.”Jerod Harris/Getty Images for VultureAhead of the “Encore” premier, we talked to Hilton and Richie about how reality TV has changed since “The Simple Life,” the impact of social media on the genre and the shows they’re enjoying now.Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.You were some of the first reality TV stars, and now it is an oversaturated industry. How do you think the landscape has changed since “The Simple Life” first aired?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

In her prescient 2012 book, “The End of Men,” my friend Hanna Rosin described a modern American dynamic between archetypes that she called “Plastic Woman” and “Cardboard Man.” These comic book characters represented American women who made miraculous social progress in the 20th century and American men who stalled out. That’s because women in the past 60 years or so have been able to be infinitely flexible and responsive to structural economic changes and men remained rigid planks. This hasn’t just caused a shift in the job market, it’s caused a shift in the marriage market, too. If men aren’t breadwinners, and they’re not caregivers, either — what are they for?Rosin explains that Plastic Woman went “from barely working at all to working only until she got married to working while married and then working with children, even babies. If a space opens up for her to make more money than her husband, she grabs it.” By contrast, Cardboard Man “hardly changes at all. A century can go by and his lifestyle and ambitions remain largely the same. There are many professions that have gone from all-male to female, and almost none that have gone the other way.”She added that a man’s sense of himself is often tied to having a traditionally masculine, physical job in construction, utility work or some kind of manufacturing. “They could move more quickly into new roles now open to them — college graduate, nurse, teacher, full-time father — but for some reason, they hesitate.”A lot of Rosin’s book still rings true 12 years later. Though on the campaign trail both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris promised to bring back those old-school, manly jobs, as Rebecca Patterson pointed out in an Opinion guest essay in October, manufacturing jobs are long gone and they’re not returning. “Even if every estimated open role is filled, the total employed in manufacturing would still be about three million short of its 1979 peak, according to Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis data,” Patterson noted.Which is why I was so pleased to see that Cardboard Man may be softening up, even as the political posturing around him may not have shifted. According to Harriet Torry in The Wall Street Journal, “The number of male registered nurses in the U.S. has nearly tripled since the early 2000s,” going “from about 140,000 in 2000 to about 400,000 in 2023.” In health care, wage and market growth exceed the national average, and people still need emergency surgeries even in recessions, CNN’s Bryan Mena notes. Health care jobs are particularly vital in rural parts of the country, where hospitals may be among the largest employers in the area.Torry describes men who are moving into traditionally female jobs (or the “pink collar” sector) as rational economic actors who are dealing with the job market as it is, rather than as they wish it might be. “Many of the manufacturing jobs that are being moved overseas, replaced by automation or phased out of the American economy were mostly filled by men. As a result, other occupations traditionally dominated by women are now gaining a larger share of men, including elementary and middle schoolteachers and customer service representatives,” Torry writes.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

A mother-in-law is unsure whether to say something to her son (or his wife) after hearing through the grapevine about an upsetting scene at a hotel bar.A friend of mine saw my daughter-in-law in a hotel bar with a man who is not my son. As my friend reported it, my daughter-in-law was dressed to the nines, draped all over the man and feeding him with her fingers. My friend walked over to her and asked, “Where are your husband and the kids?” My daughter-in-law answered calmly, and my friend walked away. This information is making me quite angry and sad. Do I tell my son about it, ask my daughter-in-law or keep it to myself?MOMLet’s start with the loving heart of your question: You feel protective of your son and want good things for him. Nothing wrong with that! Now, your friend’s account — though it may be totally accurate — strikes me as the stuff of romance novels: a steamy seduction in a hotel bar. But your daughter-in-law’s nonchalance with your friend tells a different story: Wouldn’t she be flustered if she were caught doing something wrong? Things aren’t adding up here!So, is your friend trustworthy? If you have doubts, put this matter on hold (for now). If not, and you want your son to know the story, report it to him in a more measured way. Be sure to tell him that you did not witness any of it personally. I would not talk to your daughter-in-law about this. Your relationship with her, even if it’s close, is based on her marriage — the intimate workings of which are none of your business.Now, I know that I am threading a dubious needle here: sanctioning meddlesome behavior for the sake of (possibly) mitigating harm. Your son and daughter-in-law may have an arrangement that could explain what your friend saw, and reporting the story may strain your relationship with the couple. Still, if you decide to speak up, try to put aside your own feelings. Your anger and sadness — which I sympathize with — are not the point here.Miguel PorlanNext Subject, PleaseI celebrate holidays with my mom’s side of the family. They live closer than my father’s side. But my maternal grandparents are extremely conservative; I am not. I would be fine keeping our views to ourselves, but they lecture me. This Thanksgiving, topics included why I should share their religious beliefs and why it’s inappropriate for me to wear short pants. How do I tell them I’m not OK with this?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Rebels are asserting control in Damascus as Israel and other countries carry out military operations.Follow live updates here.As a rebel alliance tries to create a transitional government for Syria, armed factions and outside powers are still fighting to fill the void left by retreating government forces.Kurdish-led fighters in northern Syria who are backed by the United States said early Wednesday that they had agreed to a U.S.-brokered cease-fire in Manbij, a city where they have been battling to fend off forces backed by Turkey.And the Israeli military has launched hundreds ofairstrikes against military assets across Syria in recent days, saying it was trying to keep them out of the hands of Islamist extremists.Here’s a guide to understanding where things stand in Syria, and what may come next.Here’s what you need to know:Who’s in charge?Who is Ahmed al-Shara?What is Israel doing in Syria?What is Turkey doing?What is the U.S. doing?What are the internal factions in Syria?Who’s in charge?Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, whose name means Organization for the Liberation of the Levant, was the main rebel group leading the latest offensive, launching a surprise assault in late November from northwestern Syria that quickly led to the fall of President Bashar al-Assad. It is now leading the transition to a new Syrian government.Mohammed al-Bashir, a rebel leader affiliated with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, announced in a brief address on Syrian television on Tuesday that he was assuming the role of caretaker prime minister until March. 1. Mr. al-Bashir previously served as the head of the administration in rebel-held territory in the northwest.Approximate advance of the Israeli military into the buffer zone More

In its first statement about the turmoil over President Yoon Suk Yeol’s martial law decree, the North said nothing about how inter-Korean relations might be affected.North Korea made its first public statement on Wednesday about the short-lived declaration of martial law in South Korea last week, with its state media saying that President Yoon Suk Yeol had plunged his country into “pandemonium.”The article gave no indication of how the turmoil in the South might affect relations between the Koreas. Since Mr. Yoon, who has a confrontational policy toward North Korea, took office in 2022, the relationship has reached its lowest point in years.The North’s main government newspaper, the Rodong Sinmun, gave the article relatively little prominence, running it on the sixth page of its Wednesday edition. It summarized Mr. Yoon’s failed attempt to seize control of the National Assembly on Dec. 3 by sending in troops, the spread of protests across South Korea and the political uncertainty that has prevailed since then.“The puppet Yoon Suk Yeol’s shocking decision to level his fascist guns and bayonets at his own people has turned the puppet South into pandemonium,” the article said.It also said that the failure of opposition lawmakers’ attempt to impeach Mr. Yoon in the National Assembly on Saturday, after Mr. Yoon’s People Power Party boycotted the vote, had turned all of South Korea into a “protest scene.”The political vacuum in the South has raised concerns that its government and military could be ill-prepared for any escalation in tensions with Kim Jong-un’s regime in the North.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

The announcement came as Donald Trump Jr. has been seen with the socialite Bettina Anderson in Florida.It was an announcement made amid a swirl of tabloid speculation: Kimberly Guilfoyle, a loyalist of President-elect Donald J. Trump and — more pointedly — the fiancée of his son Donald Jr. had been named ambassador to Greece.The timing of the move — early Tuesday evening — would have been unremarkable except for what preceded it: rumors that the president-elect’s eldest son was dating a socialite, Bettina Anderson.The new relationship was seemingly documented in a series of photos published earlier on Tuesday by the British tabloid The Daily Mail, which described them as “incontrovertible proof the soon-to-be First Son has moved on” with a “stunning ‘it girl.’”Andrew Surabian, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, 46, did not return a request for comment on his relationship with Ms. Anderson, or on his engagement with Ms. Guilfoyle, to whom he has been betrothed since late 2020. Ms. Anderson, 38, also did not return requests for comment.In his announcement of her posting to Greece, the president-elect called Ms. Guilfoyle “a close friend and ally,” but made no mention of her relationship with his son.“Her extensive experience and leadership in law, media, and politics along with her sharp intellect make her supremely qualified to represent the United States,” the elder Mr. Trump wrote, in a post on Truth Social.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Kathy Bloomer and Jeff Chen have their first Times collaboration.Jump to: Today’s Theme | Tricky CluesWEDNESDAY PUZZLE — My first instinct as I wrote my introduction to today’s crossword, brought to us by Kathy Bloomer and Jeff Chen, was to use the phrase “mixed feelings” as a witty play on the puzzle’s theme. But to use that expression risked muddling my true impressions of the puzzle, which were hardly halfhearted. My solving experience was unequivocally delightful.If you have any other witty summaries to offer for Ms. Bloomer and Mr. Chen’s theme, I hope you’ll share them in the comments section, also known as a place where we mix feelings.Today’s ThemeAt 28-Down, we get a [Description of this puzzle’s circled letters, and a clue to what they spell]: IN ONE SENSE.Now, follow along carefully. Each circled letter in this puzzle appears IN ONE SENSE of the bodily kind. The entry at 5-Down, REHEARSING, places its circled S within a gray-shaded HEARING. At 23-Down, the [Appliance with a door and a crumb tray] is a TOASTER OVEN, and its circled O appears inside the word TASTE. A similar pattern places the first R of FREELOADERS (24D) inside FEEL, the first T of HANGS TIGHT (10D) in SIGHT and the A of SAM ELLIOTT (30D) in SMELL.Not only do the circled letters appear within human senses, but together they spell the word SORTA — an expression that can be used in lieu of IN ONE SENSE. (Now, see what I meant about “mixed feelings”?)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

The elite Brooklyn school commissioned an investigation after the arrest of Winston Nguyen, who is now accused of soliciting lewd photographs from students.Top administrators at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn knowingly hired a felon to teach math and then “shamed” teachers, students and parents who expressed discomfort with his conduct “as racist or not progressive,” according to a scathing report released on Tuesday.The teacher, Winston Nguyen, is now accused of soliciting lewd images from students and faces 11 felony charges, including using a child in a sexual performance, promoting a sexual performance by a child and disseminating indecent material to a minor.But the report said that while its students were facing a barrage of online requests for naked picture and videos, the school was treating Mr. Nguyen as a valued employee whose unusual behavior was ignored or explained away.“In some instances,” the report said, administrators “prioritized teachers including Nguyen over the concerns of students and their families about the teacher’s background or behavior.”The elite private school — famed for what the report calls its “systematically asystematic” culture, celebrity parents and alumni, high Ivy League matriculation rate and unusual hiring practices — has been hobbled by scandals in recent years. It is unclear how the report will affect its reputation among parents of prospective students and fund-raising efforts.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More