It was so refreshing to hear Aaron Sorkin admit he was bad at parts of directing after his movie flop. If only others could be as frank

By most accounts, Aaron Sorkin’s new film The Social Reckoning, a follow-up to his 2010 smash-hit The Social Network, is a flop. The film critic Mark Kermode’s response to seeing it was that Sorkin, who is widely regarded as one of the greatest living screenwriters, is “not a great director”.

It seems that Sorkin agrees. Because Sorkin is very famous, he has had to do the rounds talking about the film in the media, which led to his appearance on the Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast earlier this week, in which he addressed these kinds of criticisms head on. “I’m very worried that the parts of directing that I’m not good at are those parts that you can’t learn,” he said. “In addition to having absorbed none of the science of filmmaking, I have – and this is a problem in a visual medium – I have no visual sensibility at all, it turns out.”

Imogen West-Knights is a writer and journalist

Do we really want a slick digital message board overseen by Amazon? It’s the neighbourhood nonsense we treasure

Ring, the Amazon subsidiary of camera-enabled doorbells fame, wants to be an even bigger part of your neighbourhood. Next month in the UK, it will be launching Neighbours, a community app that seeks to replace the now traditional neighbourhood Facebook or WhatsApp group. It will be available inside the Ring app, free to everybody, including people without Ring products, and will include a community requests feature wherein the police can ask for footage from residents living near reported crimes, who can then choose whether or not to share it.

My first thought was that this is curtain-twitching culture gone mad. If you must have a Ring doorbell (and my instinctive feeling as someone without one, a feeling I will no doubt have until I get one and decide it’s great, is that it’s narc-coded behaviour) then: OK. But does Amazon need to be in charge of a digital village messageboard too?

Imogen West-Knights is a writer and journalist

Some of the most popular simulator games are outlandishly boring. But curiously, it’s satisfying to complete pointless tasks when the stakes are so low

When I was at university I had a friend who had a strange hobby. He would sit in his room and play a hunting simulation game on his computer. “Game” struck me as a misleading word for what this program allowed you to do, though. You’d have to sit hunkered in the digital undergrowth waiting long, long stretches for a deer to walk through your gun sights. So long, in fact, that the game came with an inbuilt noughts and crosses function so you had something to entertain you while doing this supposedly entertaining thing.

His other friends and I thought this noughts and crosses thing was hysterical. Why play a game so dull that it needs another game inside it? But simulator games, of which hunting is just one type, have only grown more popular since then – and to an astonishing degree. The global simulation games market was worth an estimated $4.86bn (£3.6bn) in 2020, and is expected to generate about $21bn by 2030. And I don’t just mean games like The Sims or Rollercoaster Tycoon or Stardew Valley: brightly coloured games in which there are clearly exciting objectives and lots of things to do. I mean games that are almost outlandishly dull in their conceit. There is Farming Simulator and Euro Truck Simulator, where you drive an HGV across the continent, another where you pilot commercial flights in real time – and many, many more.

I write video games myself, narrative point-and-click stuff, so I have watched this trend with interest and confusion. I wanted to know: what is it about these games? Lawn Mowing simulator seemed the most purely boring to me, but sadly it is only available on PC. You can download an expansion pack for that one that allows you to mow lawns in “ancient Britain”. Wonders never cease. So instead I went for the PowerWash simulator as the game to try to get into – because when I was in the throes of an acute heartbreak some years ago, my poor mother suggested that instead of crying all day in the kitchen I might like to power-wash her patio while crying instead. Which I did, and remember finding it an oddly satisfying if abject experience. Power washers work very well. The patio became clean. Something was not going to shit.

In a world of data theft and online scams, there is something thrillingly analogue about these audacious robberies

Now, let me begin by saying: stealing is bad. I don’t think you should steal things. It is a good way to get yourself sent to prison and it is morally wrong to take things that don’t belong to you. Cargo theft? Bad. Stealing priceless artworks from museums where they could be enjoyed by everyone? Bad.

And yet. And yet.

The story has sparked debates about cryogenics and fidelity. But it also tells us something deeper about our responses to loss

One of the last remaining fun things about the internet is getting to pass judgment on the goings-on in households that you would never hear about otherwise. On Reddit, for instance, there is a whole thriving sub for just this purpose called Am I the Asshole?, where people describe conflicts from their lives and ask strangers to adjudicate on them.

This week, a story on the BBC threw up a particularly juicy piece of other people’s business that has been sparking debates on Chinese social media. It starts in 2017, when Gui Junmin decided to cryogenically freeze his wife, Zhan Wenlian, after she died of lung cancer. She was the first Chinese person to undergo this procedure, which was paid for by a science research institute in Jinan, east China, that agreed with Gui to preserve his wife’s body for 30 years. Reports suggest Zhan herself consented to the process before she passed away.

Imogen West-Knights is a writer and journalist