A large sprawling city, a cosmopolis that turns everyone into both a stranger and a visitor liberated in nooks and crannies without addressesprobably this is what makes Paris and New York difficult to forget.

In that embattled territory, children were watching the Charlie Chaplin film, The Kid. They laughed uproariously. Their parents or older siblings were probably keeping watch on the border with their rifles cocked, but in Rojava, in the area of North Syria occupied by the Kurds, there was a pause in war, and people were building hope.

A, B, C. Folders containing papers with lists of dozens of names lying on a table in a detention center in Jakarta, with classifications that will determine the fate of the detainees. A: to be killed. B: to be exiled to Nusakambangan. C: to be detained at the nearest city. Or for action unspecified.

1965: What is frightening in remembering?

Father Jacques was abducted early in the third week of May 2015. He was sitting in his narrow room in the Mar Elian monastery on the outskirts of the town of Qaryatain in Syria when some armed men from ad-Dawlah al-Islamiyah arrived. Islamic State took him hostage. Not many people knew about it.

Every October 28th I am reminded of soto. On that day in 1928, when the youths made their pledge for "one country, one nation, and one language", there was no general acclaim for "one soto, Indonesian soto" to be heard.