As I mentioned last week, I traveled to Germany, Austria, Poland and The Czech Republic last month as part of my graduate work in Holocaust and Genocide Education. For those interested, here are some photos and annotations of the places we visited. (Scroll to the bottom. There are two pages.)

1. Storied Colors explains how pigments, dyes, lakes, etc, received their names. Fascinating.

2. Ask an Astronaut. “Find your question among hundreds of astronaut interviews aboard the International Space Station.”

3. Eyeball: try to guess the location of a randomly generator number on a timeline. Fun. Plus, Population Around a Point.

4. From the department of retro-interiors, A Look at the Hilltop Steak House Family’s Longtime Lynnfield Home

5. RIP Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis.

From the description, “About half of all Oklahomans live within a mile of an oil and gas site. A new documentary from The Frontier and ProPublica exposes the failure of state regulators to protect residents from a massive underground pollution crisis.”

I’m proud of this one and I hope you’ll check it out.

1. 250 to 250, esteemed historian Heather Cox Richardson has produced a series of one-minute docs on “the many people, places, and events that have built our country and remind us of the power of each person to make history.”

2. The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech. Also in lists, The 100 Greatest Bird Names of All Time.

3. Three Ways to Get Paid and America Wealth, Sliced Up.

4. From filmmaker Adam Westbrook, Hayao Miyazaki’s wisdom for stuck artists. Also, I’m halfway through Austin Kleon’s new book, Don’t Call It Art and it’s excellent, as expected.

5. A few weeks old but brilliant all the same: Wanton Destruction Of CBS Property - Letterman & Colbert Toss Stuff Off The Roof Of The Ed Sullivan.

1. In photos, Dani Guindo’s Dramatic Aerial Photos Reveal the Ghostly Outline of an Icelandic Glacier. Plus, It’s Their Mona Lisa – What institutions besides the Louvre consider to be their “Mona Lisa.”

2. A Miraculous Escape, a hare outsmarts two chasing dogs. Plus, Inside America’s Most Remote & Forgotten Islands. A really interesting edit, too.

3. Discover Music Through Samples, search the database to see which songs use the same samples.

4. I love this: Tiny Toolkits. See the toolkits others are packing.

5. How to reach an actual person on the phone at dozens of companies.

1. As I wrote on Instagram last week, Tom Noonan, my friend, teacher snd mentor for nearly three decades passed away last weekend. I saw his masterpiece “What Happened Was…” in 1994 while living in Cambridge, MA and then sought him out when I moved to NYC 4 years later. Though I already had an MFA, Tom taught me how to write. He taught me how to have a creative life. And every thing I wrote, produced or directed since was influenced by him. He was a singular talent. He will be dearly missed by me and all the actors and writers whom he loved and nurtured through his theater, Paradise Factory. What an enormous loss. Rest easy, Tom. May his name always be a blessing.

2. Jesse Jackson’s brilliant SNL rendition of Green Eggs and Ham from 1991. Plus, reading the poem I Am–Somebody on Sesame Street. Rest in Peace.

3. The great Robert Duvall also left us. Here he is in one of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite movies, 1983’s Tender Mercies.

4. A nice reminder that “Everyone’s living a life you know nothing about. Be kind.”

5. People are terrible at remembering color. Don’t believe me, try this game. Plus, from The New York Times. Future Cringe, things we’ll look back on and cringe.