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      Bronwyn Newport’s Style Stands Out on ‘Real Housewives of Salt Lake City’

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      The addition of Bronwyn Newport to the cast of “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” has added a maximalist approach to a series known for its understated aesthetic.When Bronwyn Newport, a fashion blogger, joined the cast of Bravo’s “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” for its fifth season, she immediately caused a stir among a cast of compelling reality TV veterans, and not just because she was quickly drawn into the drama.The typical Salt Lake City fashion aesthetic is relatively casual — one popular uniform is jeans, a neutral-colored sweater and a designer bag — replete with “Utah curls” in which waist-length hair is styled into beach waves. With her dark, blunt-cut bob and her loud, whimsical outfit choices, Ms. Newport couldn’t have blended in among her Salt Lake peers even if she wanted to (she didn’t, of course).“I just think that — almost to a fault — my goal is to look different,” Ms. Newport, 39, said in a recent phone interview. “When people don’t get it or don’t like it or look at it weird or misunderstand where I’m coming from, from a style perspective, it almost spurs me on in a really immature way.”Ms. Newport’s maximalist approach to style has its roots in the Netherlands, where she lived as a child, as well as in the rest of Europe, where she says fashion leans architectural, edgy and is less directed at the male gaze. She considers every day an occasion for dressing up — ordering Chinese food calls for pajamas printed with Chinese takeout containers, for example — and would not be caught dead in jeans.Ms. Newport, left, is easy to spot among her “Real Housewives” co-stars like Meredith Marks.Joshua Applegate/Bravo“If you see me in jeans, you should be concerned,” she said jokingly. “We’re at the beginning of a spiral of some kind where I am unwell, mentally or physically or emotionally somehow.”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

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      Cher Can, and Does, Turn Back Time

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      In the first volume of her memoir (which she hasn’t read), she explores her difficult childhood, her fraught marriage to Sonny Bono and how she found her voice.Twice during a 90-minute interview about her memoir, Cher asked, “Do you think people are going to like it?”Even in the annals of single-name celebrities — Sting, Madonna, Beyoncé, Zendaya — Cher is in the stratosphere of the one percent. She’s been a household name for six decades. She was 19 when she had her first No. 1 single with Sonny Bono. She won an Oscar for “Moonstruck,” an Emmy for “Cher: The Farewell Tour” and a Grammy for “Believe.” Her face has appeared on screens of all sizes, and her music has been a soundtrack for multiple generations, whether via vinyl, eight track, cassette tape, compact disc or Spotify.But wrangling a definitive account of her life struck a nerve for Cher. There were dark corners to explore and 78 years of material to sift through. And — this might have been the hardest part — she had to make peace with the fact that her most personal stories will soon be in the hands of scores of readers.“This book has exhausted me,” she said of the first volume of her two-part eponymous memoir, out on Nov. 19. “It took a lot out of me.”“Cher” is a gutsy account of tenacity and perseverance: Cher’s childhood was unstable. Her marriage to Sonny Bono had devastating aftershocks. The book is also a cultural history packed with strong opinions, boldface names and head-spinning throwbacks: Cher’s first concert was Elvis. Her first movie was “Dumbo.” (She was so rapt, she wet her pants.) One of the first cars she drove was a ’57 Chevy stolen from her boyfriend.On the page, Cher’s voice reverberates with the grit and depth that made her famous.“I learned early that most adults were unpredictable, so I couldn’t count on them and had to be constantly vigilant,” Cher writes of her parents, pictured here in New Mexico in the 1950s.via CherWe 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

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      When Garrett Hedlund’s Friends Call at 3 a.m., He Picks Up

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      To have people like that in your life “is a damn special thing,” said the actor, one of the stars of “Tulsa King.”Garrett Hedlund knows the allure of chaos — both onscreen in the television series “Tulsa King” as Mitch, a former bull rider and recovered addict, and offscreen as a restless Minnesotan who made his way to Hollywood and into movies like “Troy,” “Tron: Legacy” and “Friday Night Lights.”“The silence, peace, serenity, isolation, the chores that pushed you away — it’s everything that eventually pulls you back,” he said in a video call from the Connecticut farm, circa 1738, that he now owns, with its apple orchard, big pond, old barn and wooded trails.Now that Rhodes, his son with the actress Emma Roberts, is turning 4, “I get to share with him a little slice of the beauty of what I got to be raised with — even though at the time I didn’t see it as the beauty my father saw it as,” Hedlund said before expressing gratitude for his Gibson guitar, the music of Blaze Foley and Moleskin notebooks.These are edited excerpts from the conversation.My SonMe and his mother, we co-parent, and I feel we co-parent quite wonderfully in this job. It’s not always the easiest. There’s a lot of sacrifices, but our sacrifices tend to be out of love for him. There’s rarely a day that goes by that one of us isn’t completely 100 percent there for him and with him.My 27-Inch Gibson L1I found it at a guitar shop in Birmingham, Ala. I was just looking for a travel guitar, and then I saw this 27 L1 hanging on the wall, and I fell in love instantly. Then this owner said goodbye in his own personal way. It was a guitar that he was selling of sentimental value, and I received it in a very parallel manner.My PassportI’ve always been an “I can fit my life in a carry-on” kind of guy, and a passport was always a bonus to extend a little bit of reach of freedom and possibility.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

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      ‘Chicken Shop Date’ and the Art of Talk-Show Flirtation

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      Banter can be funny and sexy at the same time, as the web series shows. David Letterman and Teri Garr knew that. If only today’s late-night hosts did.Seduction is woven into the relationship between interviewer and subject. To get someone to open up, you need to build trust, ask nosy questions, charm, prod. It’s a delicate dance.The internet hit “Chicken Shop Date” takes this idea and runs with it. Its host, the flamboyantly unimpressed British comedian Amelia Dimoldenberg, invites celebrities with something to promote out on a date. Part of the joke is that the encounter takes place in the least romantic of places, brightly lit fast-food joints. Yet over the past decade, she has consistently produced entertainingly charged conversations.In tightly edited meet-cutes with Jack Harlow or Jennifer Lawrence or, most recently (and famously), Andrew Garfield, Dimoldenberg has done more than anyone to resuscitate the dying art of talk-show flirtation.Network late-night hosts today are all scrupulously respectable married men (along with an introverted single woman, Taylor Tomlinson). They are more likely to stare into the eyes of a beautiful actress and gush about her movie than chat her up. Popular podcasters like Joe Rogan or Andrew Schulz are just as sexless, more comfortable with amiable banter among straight dudes than awkward tension with the opposite sex.It wasn’t always so. Johnny Carson and Angie Dickinson once dated, and you could tell when she went on his show. Faced with a beautiful actress, Craig Ferguson tended to rip up his notes and put his Scottish accent to work, bantering lasciviously. My favorite romantic comedies as a kid were not at the movies, but on “Late Night with David Letterman.” Letterman was not above cheap leering, but more than his predecessors, he sought formidable counterparts for flirty comic repartee. An on-air prank call to the office across the street from his studio led to a riveting monthly segment with a sharp-witted book publicist, Meg Parsont, that went on for years and came off like a courtship from some bizarro-world reality TV show.Dimoldenberg belongs to this tradition but also breaks from it. She is a casually arch woman on the internet, not a besuited man on television, and pushes the performance of romance (and comedy) further. She asks some standard questions (“Snog, marry, avoid?”), but she seeks out chaos, awkwardness and a certain prickly playfulness.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

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      in Music

      The 25th Latin Grammys Showed Their Age

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      While Latin music looks ahead, its biggest awards show, broadcast live from Miami on Thursday night, looked back.The 25th annual Latin Grammy Awards, broadcast live on Univision from the Kaseya Center in Miami on Thursday night, consciously looked backward. Frequent winners collected more top awards. Clips from past shows bracketed live shots. There were fervent tributes to departed superstars and nods to musical dynasties.In an era when many Latin musicians are experimenting and gleefully warping genre boundaries, the Latin Grammys flaunted the familiar. Perhaps that’s inevitable for an institution marking a milestone. But that earnestness cut back on the old Latin Grammy carnival spirit. The show still had some visual flair — particularly in the surreal, asymmetrical dresses worn by women who appeared as presenters and attendees. But its music held back.The Dominican songwriter Juan Luis Guerra and his group 4.40 won awards for album of the year for “Radio Güira,” a six-song EP, and record of the year for the single “Mambo 23.” “Radio Güira” also won the award for bachata/merengue album and “Mambo 23” for tropical song. Guerra has won 28 Latin Grammys, dating back to two at the first event in 2000.Jorge Drexler, who won song of the year on Thursday night, now has 15 Latin Grammys.Zak Bennett/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe Uruguayan songwriter Jorge Drexler’s “Derrumbe” (“Collapse”) — a brief, poetic ballad with turbulent studio undercurrents — was named song of the year. It also tied with Kany García’s “García” for cantautor (singer-songwriter) song. Drexler now has 15 Latin Grammys.The Latin Grammy broadcast, like the Grammy Awards show, focuses on performances, not presentations. Only nine of the 58 Latin Grammy categories received awards on the broadcast; the others were presented earlier Thursday afternoon on a webcast. Edgar Barrera was named both songwriter and producer of the year, and the Argentine songwriter Nathy Peluso won three awards. The Portuguese-language categories included two awards for the Brazilian songwriter Jota.Pê and a third for the engineers of his album “Se o Meu Peito Fosse o Mundo” (“If My Chest Were the World”).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

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      Billy Bob Thornton Reflects on Life and ‘Landman’

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      You would think a performing arts hall in Connecticut named after Katharine Hepburn, in a quiet seaside town like Old Saybrook would be safe. You would think a crowd of mostly ex-hippie gray-hairs, who had paid to sit in plush red chairs, hear you sing and have you sign their “Bad News Bears” posters, would be free of hecklers.You would be wrong. And now Billy Bob Thornton, on tour with his rock band the Boxmasters, was going to have to invite a man who had just called him a “condescending jerk” — except he hadn’t shouted “jerk” — to come up and sit on the edge of the stage with him and work this out, man to man. He was going to have to explain, as he has surely gotten tired of explaining, that he isn’t who you think he is.“I can tell you people that I know personally, who will walk by every fan and not even look at them,” he said from the stage. “I stand by the bus and I sign every person’s picture. I talk to everybody. I take a picture with everyone.”It was, in the end, a perfectly pleasant conversation, but one might assume that at 69, a man of Thornton’s acclaim and accomplishments wouldn’t feel the need to plead his case at all. Again wrong. While he was reluctant to talk about the incident when we caught up by phone a few weeks later, he is otherwise open about his insecurities and his feelings of being misunderstood, just as he is open about his disappointments — particularly his disappointments with Hollywood.If Thornton has appeared to pull back from Hollywood a bit in recent years, that is by design. The once up-and-coming filmmaker who wrote, directed and starred in the Oscar-winning “Sling Blade” had already given up writing and directing movies years ago because of how studios treated him just after that 1996 film — something he is “still pissed off” about, he said. He still loves acting but is increasingly selective: His role in the new Taylor Sheridan series “Landman,” premiering Sunday on Paramount+, is one of only a handful of major roles he has taken since “Bad Santa 2,” from 2016.In the new Taylor Sheridan series “Landman,” Thornton plays a guy who is basically Thornton if he had a job putting out fires, figurative and literal, on a West Texas oil field.Emerson Miller/Paramount+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

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      Late Night Feels Queasy About America’s Next Health Czar, R.F.K. Jr.

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      Stephen Colbert urged viewers to keep an open mind about the pick, “because that’s how the worm gets in.”Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Take Your VitaminsOn Thursday, President-elect Donald J. Trump said he would nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic known for some strange encounters with animals, to be his secretary of health and human services.Stephen Colbert advised his booing audience to keep an open mind, “because that’s how the worm gets in.”“So, R.F.K. Jr. is now in charge of our health, exactly what everyone voted for. Surely, this will lower the price of eggs.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“And who better to be in charge of health and humans than a guy whose brain was partially devoured by a worm?” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Unpasteurized whale juice for everybody!” — JORDAN KLEPPER“Wow, this is exciting news. We are making things in America again, specifically, Patient Zeros.” — JORDAN KLEPPER“If you’ve been feeling under the weather since the election, don’t worry — pretty soon, everyone else will be sick, too.” — JORDAN KLEPPER“Trump originally wanted a doctor in that role. Turns out the late, great Hannibal Lecter isn’t a real person, so.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“There are many theories as to why Trump is naming a battalion of bozos to do these very important jobs. Some believe he’s testing the Republican Congress to see how far he can push them. Some say he’s doing this strategically to weaken certain sections of the government. Or, and this is the theory that I believe, he’s dumb.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Yesterday’s Bad News Continued Edition)“President-elect Trump announced yesterday on Truth Social that he is picking Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz to be his attorney general. Even crazier: Gaetz’s girlfriend just got Class President.” — SETH MEYERS“When asked about President-elect Trump selecting Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz as his nominee for attorney general, Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski said it was not on her ‘bingo card.’ As for what’s on Matt Gaetz’s bingo card: B-17.” — SETH MEYERS“OK, senator, that is your first mistake right there. Now that Trump’s been re-elected, we all get new bingo cards with none of those boring numbers like B-14 and N-7. Mine has, let’s see, ‘Trump/Putin, matching tracksuits,’ ‘Chief Justice Kid Rock’ and ‘Deport Ricky Martin.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“For everyone who didn’t have that on your bingo card, maybe throw out the bingo card, ’cause it’s a whole new bingo now. Instead of numbers, it’s just going to be symbols from the Zodiac killer.” — SETH MEYERSThe Bits Worth WatchingJimmy Fallon presented Michael Bublé with his new album, “Holiday Seasoning,” as an early Christmas gift on Thursday’s “Tonight Show.”Also, Check This OutChristian Borle, left, as Jim Bakker and Katie Brayben as Tammy Faye Bakker in the musical “Tammy Faye” at the newly renovated Palace Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA new Broadway musical about Tammy Faye fails to capture her campy persona. More

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      Season 2 of ‘Bad Sisters’ Is Still Stylish and Thrilling

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      There is a sense, however, that the most important events in this offbeat Apple TV+ drama happened in Season 1.Season 2 of “Bad Sisters” (two episodes of which are available now, on Apple TV+) arrives after a two-year break, but the plots and pressures are driven completely by the action of the first season. The Garvey sisters are still recalibrating their lives after the secret murder of one sister’s monstrous husband, J.P., a slimy abuser who deserved every bad thing that came his way. But secrets are only ever buried alive — and as any fan of the lurid knows, it’s not the crime, it’s the cover up.When the season begins, Eva (Sharon Horgan, also a creator and executive producer) has a menopause coach and a pep in her step. Ursula (Eva Birthistle), a nurse, is now thoroughly divorced and co-parenting. Bibi (Sarah Greene), the one with the eye patch, and her wife are preparing for fertility treatments, while Becka (Eve Hewson) has a bro-y new boyfriend. And Grace (Anne-Marie Duff), whose now-dead husband was the source of so much suffering, is getting married to the handsome Ian (Owen McDonnell), who even gets along well with her teenage daughter, Blanaid (Saise Quinn).The central villain of Season 1 has been dispatched, so there’s a new antagonist; this time instead of a smarmy rapist, it’s a pushy busybody named Angelica (Fiona Shaw), identified onscreen as “the Wagon.” That’s Irish slang for … uh … a woman everyone really likes and respects and gets along with. As with Season 1, the true evil is not one individual but rather misogyny.“I’m a woman of the church,” Angelica tells her brother, Roger (Michael Smiley), the neighbor who helped Grace and is haunted by his role in the crime. “I’m in the guilt industry. I know guilt when I see it.” She has plenty to turn her attention to, then, and she wastes no time. Guilt is a constant companion here, a mechanism for control both in broader society and on an individual basis, and we see characters sacrifice more and more of themselves to managing its burden.A lot of what made Season 1 such a thrill is intact here: The show remains pointed and stylish, and the chemistry among the sisters — and their not-quite-matching, not-quite-not-matching costumes — is its most exciting, endearing element. But “Sisters” can’t escape the sense of rehash, the fact that all the most important things have already happened, the biggest bombs have already detonated, the most chilling secrets have already been exposed.Despite a huge, brutal twist early in the season, these additional episodes aren’t deeper or more special and specific than the first season’s. The opening credits this go-round use the same song as the first but set up a new macabre Rube Goldberg machine, and that’s kind of how the whole season feels, like a code you already have the key to.Season 2 has eight episodes, and new installments arrive on Wednesdays. More