Along the coast of Manila Bay in the Philippines, behind the grand Manila Hotel, there is a slum district called Baseco. Hidden by towering container yards and cargo ships, this shantytown had been virtually unknown until a few years ago when a television report broadcast nationwide put a red pin on the map of Manila.

The last century has been, unfortunately, a century of holocausts. The documentary “The Act of Killing” revives the memory — for both Indonesians and Americans — of one of the greatest: the Indonesian mass slaughter of 1965, whose memory, for a half century, has been perhaps the most effectively suppressed. It is, in fact, virtually impossible to consider the film, or the massacre itself, without also considering, as did my poem Coming to Jakarta, the social functions of first suppressing the most excruciating victim memories, and then painfully beginning to recover them.

On December 1, 2014 the rapidly expanding domain of renewable energy burst through a stubborn bottleneck of vested interests and outmoded ideas. Germany's biggest utility, E. ON, announced it would abandon fossil fuel and nuclear power to create “a new business model based on renewables, intelligent grid systems, energy management and other services.” If its plans go forward as proposed, E. ON's portfolio in what it calls “the new energy world” will include about 20 gigawatts of renewable generation in operation or in the pipeline, over 1 million kilometers of transmission infrastructure, and 33 million customers on the sales end. In an era of paradigmatic changes in energy technology and business models, and particularly in all aspects of electricity (i.e., from generation through distribution and to consumption), E. ON's announcement still came as a surprise even to the German authorities. Experts are struggling to grasp the enormity of the implications of E. ON's move for power systems, climate policy, financial markets, regulatory regimes, and other important aspects.