I seem to put out a strong ‘new-best-friend’ vibe, then I back off. Should I dial it down?

Sometimes we feel threatened by bids for closeness, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. It can help to consider if you’re being true to yourself

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When I was 17, I was quiet, an observer on the fringes. That was often mistaken for being wise. Now 70 (and, by the way, gay), I am chatty and opinionated with a tendency to talk over others in conversation. I have come by the changes honestly, so I don’t whip myself over it because I am enjoying expressing myself. But I do wonder if this is a normal progression, the loss of filters with ageing, or if I am simply losing my sociability – going off the rails in some way.

While I like being friendly to all and enjoy the company of women especially, I recognise how easily they can be hurt. I seem to put out a strong “new-best-friend” vibe but then sometimes, when they step close, I feel crowded and back off. The flip-flop clearly offends, and I don’t want to be doing that, but I frame it as being true to myself. Is this a destructive habit and, if so, should I dial down the friendliness?

Eleanor says: How responsible are we for the ways other people see us?

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Published: November 6, 2025, 2:00 pm

Tesla shareholders approve $1tn pay package for Elon Musk

Chants of ‘Elon’ erupt after compensation plan approved despite opposition from several high-profile investors

Tesla shareholders approved a $1tn compensation plan for CEO Elon Musk on Thursday, awarding the world’s richest person what would be the largest corporate payout in history if he meets the goals necessary to receive it.

The pay package, which several high-profile investors opposed, demonstrates that shareholders still believe Musk can lead the automaker in an era dominated by robotics and artificial intelligence.

Published: November 6, 2025, 11:14 pm

Meet gen X: middle-aged, enraged and radicalised by internet bile | Gaby Hinsliff

Who is driving the populist insurgency? It’s not grumpy pensioners or vulnerable teenagers – it’s my generation

If in doubt, we used to talk about the weather. Or if not that, then why the trains were late again, or how sweet someone’s baby was: the kind of routine bland nothings you exchange with strangers on the street. But something about the way we speak in public is changing.

A few days ago I was in Aldi, making the usual small talk at the checkout. When the cashier said she was exhausted from working extra shifts to make some money for Christmas, the man behind me chipped in that it would be worse once “she takes all our money” (in case Rachel Reeves was wondering, her budget pitch-rolling is definitely cutting through). Routine enough, if he hadn’t gone on to add that she and the rest of the government needed taking out, and that there were plenty of ex-military men around who should know what to do, before continuing in more graphic fashion until the queue fell quiet and feet began shuffling. But the strangest thing was that he said it all quite calmly, as if political assassination was just another acceptable subject for casual conversation with strangers, such as football or how long the roadworks have gone on. It wasn’t until later that it clicked: this was a Facebook conversation come to life. He was saying out loud, and in public, the kind of thing people say casually all the time on the internet, apparently without recognising that in the real world it’s still shocking – at least for now.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

Published: November 7, 2025, 6:00 am

‘Vibe coding’ beats ‘clanker’ to be Collins dictionary’s word of the year

AI-inspired word joins ‘biohacking’, ‘Henry’ and ‘broligarchy’ on tech-heavy 2025 list

“Vibe coding”, an emerging software development that turns natural language into computer code using artificial intelligence, has been named Collins dictionary’s word of the year for 2025.

Lexicographers at Collins monitor the 24bn-word Collins Corpus, which draws from a range of media sources, including social media, to create the annual list of new and notable words that reflect our ever-evolving language.

Published: November 6, 2025, 7:51 am

How Tesla shareholders put Elon Musk on path to be world’s first trillionaire

A staggering compensation package has been approved – but what does Musk have to do to reap the full rewards?

Now that Tesla stockholders have approved a plan to offer Elon Musk close to $1tn, the clock is ticking to make the company worth eight times more than it is today.

If Musk can grow Tesla to over $8tn in value for stockholders over the next decade, he will be well on his way to becoming the world’s first trillionaire.

Published: November 7, 2025, 12:46 am

Unesco adopts global standards on ‘wild west’ field of neurotechnology

UN body’s recommendations driven by AI advances and proliferation of consumer-oriented neurotech devices

It is the latest move in a growing international effort to put guardrails around a burgeoning frontier – technologies that harness data from the brain and nervous system.

Unesco has adopted a set of global standards on the ethics of neurotechnology, a field that has been described as “a bit of a wild west”.

Published: November 6, 2025, 4:00 pm

‘We’re sick of the OnlyFans model’: Stella Barey’s porn site lets gen Z sex workers have a life

The 28-year-old’s platform, Hidden, offers a Tumblr-like sensibility in an industry roiled by slop and lets adult content creators earn without burning out

Stella Barey has an hour for lunch. At 1.30pm, she loads her banged-up Tacoma with her three Belgian malinois and drives to a secret Los Angeles hiking trail. There, she gulps down a tapioca pudding and laces up her sneakers. After checking over her shoulder for foot traffic, she pulls down her brown sweatpants and jiggles her bare ass for the camera. Then come the undies. Her coiffed landing strip hovers above the rocks as a rush of urine floods the trail. Every mile she walks, she films another video: a flash, a moon, a finger up the ass.

When Barey decided in 2020 to pursue porn full-time, she did not imagine that at 28 she would spend more time hunched over a desk – not in the fun way – making flow charts, scheduling Zoom calls, and sending pitch decks. “I’m at my happiest when I’m making a video like putting a strawberry in my butt and pushing it out,” she says. “Now I’m on calls all day and I have tech neck.” Known online as the “Anal Princess”, with large, blinking Shelley Duvall eyes and an American Girl doll pout, she will try anything once – even the title “tech founder”.

Published: November 7, 2025, 12:00 pm

Driving competition: China’s carmakers in race to dominate Europe’s roads

Chinese manufacturers are using the electric transition to seize market share, with the UK as their gateway

When Tesla wanted to catch the eye of British buyers, it put its cars and bright signage at a dealership in west London’s prominent Hogarth roundabout. Exposure to half a million drivers every day helped the US carmaker to become the dominant electric vehicle seller in the UK. Yet drivers passing by that site now see something different: twin Chinese brands Omoda and Jaecoo, both owned by the state-controlled manufacturer Chery.

Chinese cars are on a roll across Europe – they outsold Korean rivals in western Europe for the first time in September. That success is highly reliant on the UK. Of the half a million Chinese cars sold in western Europe between January and September, 30% were bought by Britons, according to Matthias Schmidt, a Berlin-based automotive analyst.

Published: November 7, 2025, 6:00 am

‘Musk is Tesla and Tesla is Musk’ – why investors are happy to pay him $1tn

Making Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire appears to fit a US investment culture of backing high-flying innovators

For all the headlines about an on-off relationship with Donald Trump, baiting liberals and erratic behaviour, Tesla shareholders are loath to part with Elon Musk.

Investors in the electric vehicle maker voted on Thursday to put the world’s richest person on the path to become the world’s first trillionaire, despite the controversy that is now seemingly intrinsic to his public profile.

Published: November 7, 2025, 3:15 pm

UK union accuses GTA maker Rockstar Games of firing employees attempting to organise

According to The Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain, the developer fired more than 30 staff last week for being members of a union-affiliated Discord channel

Rockstar Games, the video game developer behind Grand Theft Auto, has been accused of carrying out a “blatant and ruthless act of union busting” after allegedly firing more than 30 workers who claim they were attempting to unionise.

According to The Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB), which represents workers in the video games industry, UK-based employees of the developer were fired last week for being members of the IWGB game workers union Discord channel. The workers claim to have been targeted for this reason, in what the union argues constitutes unlawful and retaliatory dismissals.

Published: November 7, 2025, 5:40 pm

Rockstar Games delays Grand Theft Auto VI – again – to late 2026

The hugely anticipated sequel was due to arrive in May of next year but has been pushed back to November 2026

Rockstar Games’s Grand Theft Auto VI, which was due to release on 26 May next year, has been delayed again – this time to the end of 2026. It has now been nearly two years since the game was announced, and more than 12 years since the release of Grand Theft Auto V.

“Grand Theft Auto VI will now release on Thursday, November 19, 2026,” reads Rockstar Games’s statement on X. “We are sorry for adding additional time to what we realize has been a long wait, but these extra months will allow us to finish the game with the level of polish you have come to expect and deserve.”

Published: November 6, 2025, 9:49 pm

Roblox shocks: online gaming platform should be snared by Australia’s social media ban for under-16s, experts and MPs say

Pressure mounts on Labor after Guardian Australia report documenting reporter’s week of virtual sexual harassment and violence while posing as a child avatar

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There are growing calls for the federal government to address the risks posed to children on the popular gaming platform Roblox after Guardian Australia published a report that documented a week of virtual sexual harassment and violence.

While playing as an eight-year-old girl, the reporter was given a sexualised avatar, cyberbullied, aggressively killed, sexually assaulted and shat on – all with parental control settings in place.

Published: November 6, 2025, 2:00 pm

Fortnite’s The Simpsons season is a worthy tribute to one of the most celebrated shows of all time

Crammed with cameos, this recreation of Springfield in Fortnite’s evolving virtual playground is a delight for long-time fans of the show. Shame it’s not here for long

After years of collaborations with Disney on Marvel and Star Wars, it’s finally happened: The Simpsons have arrived in Fortnite. Whereas most of these crossovers comprise themed skins and emotes, this is a complete takeover, with an entire stylised map based on Springfield to explore. It’s a smart way of introducing American TV’s longest-running sitcom to a younger audience – especially with news of a second movie on the way – but for millennials, this is the culmination of a year-long campaign to catch our attention, if previous collabs with Power Rangers, Scream and Mortal Kombat are anything to go by.

Though this could have been a quick ploy for those who grew up on a diet of afterschool BBC Two repeats to open their wallets, it’s no lazy cash-in. The familiar sights of Springfield you’d expect are here: there’s the Simpsons home on Evergreen Terrace, the sloping lawns of Burns Manor, and a town square with Moe’s Tavern and a statue of Jebediah Springfield, detachable head and all. Towards the edge of the map is the nuclear power plant, pumping cartoon steam into the sky, featuring meltdowns that you can avert by tapping a control console to the tune of “eeny, meeny, miny, moe”. Cletus’s farm and a Slurp factory (the game’s spin on Duff – no beer on tap here) sit on the corners of the island, and every match starts with a charming recreation of the show’s intro, complete with parting clouds, title card and iconic theme song, before you thank Otto as you leave the battle bus and descend on to the map.

Published: November 6, 2025, 10:40 am

Universe expansion may be slowing, not accelerating, study suggests

Astronomers cast doubt on Nobel prize-winning theory and suggest universe could end in ‘big crunch’

Astronomers have cast doubt on a Nobel prize-winning theory that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, suggesting that instead it may be slowing down.

If confirmed, this would have profound implications for the fate of the universe, raising the possibility that rather than expanding for ever, the universe could ultimately enter a reverse big bang scenario known as the big crunch. The astronomers behind the work say their observations also imply that dark energy – the mysterious force thought to be propelling the expansion of the universe – is weakening over time.

Published: November 6, 2025, 12:01 am

From St. Basil’s to Bondi: the brilliant ‘beaver’ supermoon – in pictures

The largest supermoon of the year, the so-called ‘beaver’ moon is the biggest and brightest of 2025, just 357,000 km from Earth

• Watch November’s ‘beaver’ supermoon rising over Sydney’s Bondi beach – video

• Glowing September supermoon lights up the sky – in pictures

Published: November 6, 2025, 5:00 am

Net zero is an insidious loophole that distracts from the scientific imperative to eliminate fossil fuels | Joëlle Gergis

History tells us that polite incrementalism and political kowtowing will prevail at Cop30 – even as catastrophe unfolds around us

As world leaders gather in Brazil this year for Cop30 – the first Amazonian Cop – it’s worth doing a quick reality check on how we are collectively tracking to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.

Despite 30 years of UN climate summits, about half of the carbon dioxide accumulated in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution has been emitted since 1990. Incidentally, 1990 was the year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the global authority on climate change science – released its First Assessment Report confirming the threat of human-caused global warming. As scientists all over the world prepare the IPCC’s Seventh Assessment Report, we do so knowing that our work is still being overshadowed by politics. Despite all the well-intentioned half-measures, the truth is that the world is still disastrously off track to limit dangerous climate change.

Dr Joëlle Gergis is an award-winning climate scientist and writer from the University of Melbourne. She served as a lead author on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on the Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report

Published: November 6, 2025, 11:01 pm

Canada pushes on with ‘complete depopulation’ plan to cull 400 ostriches

Country’s top court declines to block controversial cull of hundreds of birds amid fears of an avian flu outbreak

Canada’s food inspection agency says it plans to begin a “complete depopulation” of hundreds of ostriches at a farm after the country’s top court declined to block the controversial cull.

On Thursday, the supreme court said it would not take up a case that has catalyzed a fierce protest by the farm owners and protesters – as well as senior figures in the Trump administration, who have decried the public health effort as government overreach.

Published: November 6, 2025, 7:57 pm

Unesco adopts global standards on ‘wild west’ field of neurotechnology

UN body’s recommendations driven by AI advances and proliferation of consumer-oriented neurotech devices

It is the latest move in a growing international effort to put guardrails around a burgeoning frontier – technologies that harness data from the brain and nervous system.

Unesco has adopted a set of global standards on the ethics of neurotechnology, a field that has been described as “a bit of a wild west”.

Published: November 6, 2025, 4:00 pm

Scientists criticize ‘straw man’ arguments in Bill Gates climate memo

Tech billionaire relying on ‘false binary’ with call to focus less on emissions and more on aid for poor, experts say

A new memo on the climate crisis from Bill Gates relies on “straw man” arguments about the threat to humanity and “false dichotomies” between spending on climate or aid for the poor, some climate scientists say.

Published last week, the tech billionaire’s 17-page missive called for a “strategic pivot” away from focusing on slashing emissions and towards preventing poverty and suffering. It was quickly picked up by some on the right, including Donald Trump, who hailed it as a much-needed backpedaling on climate efforts.

Published: November 6, 2025, 1:00 pm

James D Watson, who co-discovered DNA’s twisted-ladder structure, dies aged 97

Nobel prize winner shaped medicine, crimefighting and genealogy, but later years marred by racist remarks

James Dewey Watson, whose co-discovery of the twisted-ladder structure of DNA in 1953 helped light the long fuse on a revolution in medicine, crimefighting, genealogy and ethics, has died, according to his former research lab. He was 97.

The breakthrough – made when the brash, Chicago-born Watson was just 24 – turned him into a hallowed figure in the world of science for decades. But near the end of his life, he faced condemnation and professional censure for offensive remarks, including saying Black people were less intelligent than white people.

Published: November 7, 2025, 9:04 pm

Amazon lakes hit ‘unbearable’ hot-tub temperatures amid mass die-offs of pink river dolphins – study

Droughts and heatwaves causing water in some areas to reach 41C, killing fish and endangered dolphins, say researchers

Amazonian lakes are being transformed into simmering basins hotter than spa baths as severe heatwaves and drought grip the region, research shows.

The temperature of one lake exceeded 40C (104F) as water levels plummeted under intense sunlight and cloudless skies. The extreme heat triggered mass die-offs among endangered Amazon river dolphins and fish, which cannot survive in such high temperatures.

Published: November 6, 2025, 7:00 pm

‘Vibe coding’ beats ‘clanker’ to be Collins dictionary’s word of the year

AI-inspired word joins ‘biohacking’, ‘Henry’ and ‘broligarchy’ on tech-heavy 2025 list

“Vibe coding”, an emerging software development that turns natural language into computer code using artificial intelligence, has been named Collins dictionary’s word of the year for 2025.

Lexicographers at Collins monitor the 24bn-word Collins Corpus, which draws from a range of media sources, including social media, to create the annual list of new and notable words that reflect our ever-evolving language.

Published: November 6, 2025, 7:51 am

Revisited: How to save the Amazon episode three: ask the people that know – podcast

Global environment editor Jon Watts goes in search of answers to the question the journalist Dom Phillips was investigating when he was murdered: how to save the Amazon?

In the final episode of this three-part series from June 2025, Jon encounters a radical new view of the Amazon’s history being uncovered by archaeologists. Far from an uninhabited wilderness, the rainforest has been shaped by indigenous peoples for thousands of years. Jon finds out how their expert knowledge could be harnessed to secure the Amazon’s future

Published: November 7, 2025, 5:00 am

Revisited: How to save the Amazon episode two: the magic and mystery – podcast

Jon Watts, the Guardian’s global environment editor, goes in search of answers to the question the journalist Dom Phillips was investigating when he was murdered: how to save the Amazon?

In episode two of this miniseries from June 2025, Jon meets the people trying to make sure the rainforest is worth more standing than cut down – from a government minister attempting to establish Brazil’s ‘bioeconomy’ to a startup founder creating superfood supplements and a scientist organising night-time tours hunting for bioluminescent fungi. Jon explores new ways of finding value in the forest and asks whether they will be enough to secure its survival

Published: November 6, 2025, 5:00 am

Beasts of the Sea by Iida Turpeinen review – a hypnotic tale of the sea cow’s extinction

This hit debut from Finland is intensely readable, but could have delved more deeply into the links between human progress and environmental destruction

In November 1741 Georg Wilhelm Steller, “theologian, naturalist, and curious man”, was shipwrecked on an island between Alaska and Russia. There he found, floating in the shallow waters, a vast sirenian, Hydrodamalis gigas, nine feet long and soon to be known as Steller’s sea cow. Having made it through the winter, largely by eating the sea cows, the following August Steller and the remaining survivors of the Great Northern Expedition left the island. Within 30 years, Steller’s sea cow was hunted to extinction.

Having described these events, Finnish author Iida Turpeinen’s debut novel goes on to describe the lives of other historical figures, each of whom are touched in some way by the sea cow, now reduced to bones. There is Hampus Furuhjelm, governor of Alaska, in search of a complete skeleton, and his sister Constance, who finds peace and intellectual autonomy among her taxidermy collection. Later, there’s Hilda Olson, a scientific illustrator, and John Grönvall, specialist in the reconstruction of birds’ eggs, who is tasked with preparing a sea cow’s relics for exhibition.

Published: November 6, 2025, 7:00 am