A local’s guide to Queenstown and Arrowtown: ‘Like walking on to a film set’

Ridiculously picturesque, with award-winning eateries and bars, the New Zealand South Island towns have more to offer than just adventure sports, restaurateur Penelope Johnson says

I’ve lived in Arrowtown/Kā-muriwai for 13 years. It’s beautifully preserved – like walking on to a film set in the gold mining days, but with Queenstown international airport at our doorstep.

Arrowtown is slower than Queenstown/Tāhuna. It’s 20 minutes away and there’s a real desire to keep that slow pace, though we welcome New Zealand/Aotearoa tourists as much as international guests.

Published: November 21, 2025, 2:00 pm

Meet the AI workers who tell their friends and family to stay away from AI

When the people making AI seem trustworthy are the ones who trust it the least, it shows that incentives for speed are overtaking safety, experts say

Krista Pawloski remembers the single defining moment that shaped her opinion on the ethics of artificial intelligence. As an AI worker on Amazon Mechanical Turk – a marketplace that allows companies to hire workers to perform tasks like entering data or matching an AI prompt with its output – Pawloski spends her time moderating and assessing the quality of AI-generated text, images and videos, as well as some factchecking.

Roughly two years ago, while working from home at her dining room table, she took up a job designating tweets as racist or not. When she was presented with a tweet that read “Listen to that mooncricket sing”, she almost clicked on the “no” button before deciding to check the meaning of the word “mooncricket”, which, to her surprise, was a racial slur against Black Americans.

Published: November 22, 2025, 2:00 pm

Bro boost: women say their LinkedIn traffic increases if they pretend to be men

Collective experiment found switching profile to ‘male’ and ‘bro-coding’ text led to big increase in reach, though site denies favouring posts by men

Do your LinkedIn followers consider you a “thought leader”? Do hordes of commenters applaud your tips on how to “scale” your startup? Do recruiters slide into your DMs to “explore potential synergies”?

If not, it could be because you’re not a man.

Published: November 22, 2025, 7:00 am

Elon Musk’s Grok AI tells users he is fitter than LeBron James and smarter than Leonardo da Vinci

Users noted that in a raft of now-deleted posts, the chatbot would frequently rank Musk top in any given field

Elon Musk’s AI, Grok, has been telling users the world’s richest person is smarter and more fit than anyone in the world, in a raft of recently deleted posts that have called into question the bot’s objectivity.

Users on X using the artificial intelligence chatbot in the past week have noted that whatever the comparison – from questions of athleticism to intelligence and even divinity – Musk would frequently come out on top.

Published: November 21, 2025, 4:25 am

Chris McCausland: Seeing into the Future – an astonishing look at how tech is changing disabled people’s lives

Prepare to have your perspective shattered by the comedian’s visits to our US tech overlords. The upcoming advancements for those with disabilities are life-changing

Washing machines liberated women to get soul-crushing jobs that ate up their free time. Social media gave the world one revolution – before it destabilised democracies everywhere else. Now AI is here, and its main job seems to be replacing screenwriters. It’s easy to fall into techno-pessimism, but new documentary Seeing into the Future (Sunday 23 November, 8pm, BBC Two) has a different angle. For disabled people, tech has already brought about life-changing advancements. And we haven’t seen anything yet.

It is presented by comedian and Strictly winner Chris McCausland, who is blind. Some of the most casually astonishing scenes occur early on, showing how he uses his phone – essentially, an eye with a mouth. “What T-shirt is this?” he asks, holding up a garment. “A grey T-shirt with a graphic logo of Deftones,” his phone obliges. It can even tell him if the shirt needs ironing. But it’s where all this is going that fascinates McCausland, so he heads to the US, to see what’s in development at the houses of our tech overlords.

Published: November 22, 2025, 7:00 am

Will pay-per-mile raise Reeves money or drive people away from electric vehicles?

Need for new road taxes is clear – but there are concerns that pricing plan could stall transition away from petrol

Three pence: a small charge per mile for an electric vehicle, but a giant conceptual leap for Britain.

Chancellors of the exchequer have long resisted any form of road pricing as politically toxic. That may be about to change next week: Rachel Reeves, perhaps inured to being pilloried for any money-raising proposal, is expected to introduce a charge explicitly linked to how far EVs drive.

Published: November 22, 2025, 6:00 am

The Guide #218: For gen Zers like me, YouTube isn’t an app or a website – it’s the backdrop to our waking lives

In this week’s newsletter: When the video-sharing site launched in 2005, there were fears it would replace terrestrial television. It didn’t just replace it – it invented entirely new forms of content. ASMR, anyone?

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Barely a month goes by without more news of streaming sites overtaking traditional, terrestrial TV. Predominant among those sits YouTube, with more than 2.5 billion monthly viewers. For people my age – a sprightly 28 – and younger, YouTube is less of an app or website than our answer to radio: the ever-present background hum of modern life. While my mum might leave Radio 4 wittering or BBC News flickering in the corner as she potters about the house, I’ve got a video essay about Japan’s unique approach to urban planning playing on my phone. That’s not to say I never watch more traditional TV (although 99% of the time I’m accessing it through some other kind of subscription streaming app), but when I get home after a long day and the thought of ploughing through another hour of grim prestige fare feels too demanding, I’m probably watching YouTube. Which means it’s very unlikely that I’m watching the same thing as you.

When Google paid $1.65bn for the platform in 2006, (just 18 months after it launched) the price seemed astronomical. Critics questioned whether that valuation could be justified for any video platform. The logic was simple – unless YouTube could replace television, it would never be worth it. Nearly two decades on, that framing undersells what actually happened. YouTube didn’t just replace television – it invented entirely new forms of content: vodcasts, vlogs, video essays, reaction videos, ASMR and its heinous cousin mukbang. The platform absorbed new trends and formats at lightning speed, building what became an alternative “online mainstream”. Before podcasters, TikTokers, Substackers and even influencers, there were YouTubers.

Published: November 21, 2025, 5:00 pm

The best air fryers, tried and tested for crisp and crunch

Air fryers have taken over our kitchens, but which wins the crown for the crispiest cooking? Our expert peeled 7kg of potatoes to find out

• The best blenders to blitz like a pro, tried and tested

Air fryers inspire the sort of feelings that microwaves did in the 1980s. I vividly remember those new-fangled boxes being spoken about often, either dismissively or with delight. A rash of cookbooks followed, and dinner changed across the land. Fast-forward a few decades, and air fryers have become the same kind of kitchen “disruptors”, offering time-saving convenience and healthier cooking, but with the added allure of easily achieved, mouth-watering crispiness.

Since launching with a single-drawer design, air fryers have evolved. Sizes range from compact to XL, while drawer configurations can be double, split or stacked. Alongside air frying, many will grill, roast and bake, and some will dip to lower temperatures for dehydrating, fermenting and proving dough. One we tested features steam cooking, allowing you to whip up dim sum as easily as a roast dinner, while another included racks for cooking on four levels.

Best air fryer overall:
Tefal Dual Easy Fry XXL EY942BG0

Best budget air fryer:
Tower AirX AI Digital Air Fryer

Published: November 21, 2025, 3:00 pm

Two UK clinical trials to assess impact of puberty blockers in young people

Multi-year studies announced after Cass review found ‘insufficient evidence’ about effects on children with gender dysphoria

Two studies to investigate the impact of puberty blockers in young people with gender incongruence have been announced by researchers in the UK after an expert view said gender medicine was “built on shaky foundations”.

Puberty blockers were originally used to treat early onset puberty in children but have also been used off-label in children with gender dysphoria or incongruence.

Published: November 22, 2025, 7:00 am

Mind-altering ‘brain weapons’ no longer only science fiction, say researchers

UK academics say latest chemicals are ‘wake-up call’ and urge global action to stop weaponisation of neuroscience

Sophisticated and deadly “brain weapons” that can attack or alter human consciousness, perception, memory or behaviour are no longer the stuff of science fiction, two British academics argue.

Michael Crowley and Malcolm Dando, of Bradford University, are about to publish a book that they believe should be a wake-up call to the world.

Published: November 22, 2025, 12:01 am