The Hollywood Reporter's Director Oscar Roundtable

The year's most notable directors join for The Hollywood Reporter's Director Oscar Roundtable. The directors include Quentin Tarantino ('The Hateful Eight'), Tom Hooper ('The Danish Girl'), Alejandro G. Inarritu ('The Revenant'), Ridley Scott ('The Martian'), Danny Boyle ('Steve Jobs') and David O. Russell ('Joy').

The birth of the web

CERN takes a look at the beginning of the web and how it flourished because the original software was made public domain: 

Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist at CERN, invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989. The web was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automatic information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world.

The first website at CERN - and in the world - was dedicated to the World Wide Web project itself and was hosted on Berners-Lee's NeXT computer. The website described the basic features of the web; how to access other people's documents and how to set up your own server. The NeXT machine - the original web server - is still at CERN. As part of the project to restore the first website, in 2013 CERN reinstated the world's first website to its original address.

On 30 April 1993 CERN put the World Wide Web software in the public domain. CERN made the next release available with an open licence, as a more sure way to maximise its dissemination. Through these actions, making the software required to run a web server freely available, along with a basic browser and a library of code, the web was allowed to flourish.

The very first web site. 

Alex Blumberg: Your Best Selling Points Are the Mistakes You've Made

Startups often have "creation myths" about their early days. But real life is much messier than that. To prove this, former This American Life producer Alex Blumberg recorded nearly every painstaking moment in creating his new podcasting company, Gimlet Media. With plenty of audio examples, Blumberg highlights the ups and downs of turning your creative art into a business, culminating in a cringe-worthy pitch to a venture capitalist.

"The story that you tell, it's like you're killing it all the time," says Blumberg. "But deep inside every single person who has ever tried to start a business, I'm sure, has had a pitch like that—if not worse."

The Clock of the Long Now

The Clock of the Long Now is a portrait of Danny Hillis and his brilliant team of inventors, futurists, and engineers as they build The 10,000 Year Clock—a grand, Stone Henge-like monolith, being constructed in a mountain in West Texas.

The film, like the clock itself, celebrates the power of long-term thinking and mankind’s insatiable thirst to solve life’s biggest problems.

The Internet Lives in a Huge Hotel in Manhattan

A great photo series by Taylor Glascock in Wired, showing the very real places that make the internet and the cloud:

Garritano always knew the Internet is as much a place as it is a thing, one where vast networks in frigid rooms move enormous amounts of data around the world. But he didn’t have a real understanding of how all that info moves from one place to another, and he wanted to find out. He’s spent the last few months doing just that, shooting at five “carrier hotels” where many networks converge to form a single, larger network. That’s why they called it the Internet. It allows an unlimited number of different networks to come together as one.