Take a moment to sympathize for the real victims of the current financial mess:

We're not totally sold on this story—a single source, and only carried in Australian papers—but looks like bad news for Paris Hilton. The hotel heiress may have to rely on her savings, as her grandfather Barron has cut the $60 million she was set to inherit out of his will. Thank God she's just been cast in "Repo! The Genetic Opera." In a singing role! Anyway, old Barron's giving the money to charity, so the odds are she may yet see some of it.

As rich-people chronicler Robert Frank points out, being a socialite is now a full-time job. So much to do, so many places to be, so many kisses to air. Take, for example, Fabiola Beracasa. She's up at the ungodly hour of 7:30, and not a scant fifteen minutes later she's out running with her trainer. And then the real work begins. But how does she unwind?

[H]aving a part-time house can be a full-time commitment, in the same way that owning a sailboat is commonly described as "standing in a shower and ripping up hundred-dollar bills." These second, but never secondary, houses can be exhausting, their owners admit, a litany of bills and guilt and traffic — and meals to cook for guests who arrive with only one wish: to be entertained.

David Dangle, above right, and his partner, Sam Byrd, should be ashamed of themselves. Darfur, motherfuckers!

And we officially have ourselves a trend! At least in the Times, which, as Seth Mnookin points out, is following up its Pulitzer-baiting "Class Matters" series with an incisive series of reports on "the plight of those who only break the top one percent of American wage earners." Today's entry in the saga is the Louis Uchitelle weeper, "Very Rich Are Leaving the Merely Rich Behind." A brief taste after the jump: It's a bit on how the superrich manage to keep it real.