Most of the time, reducing a geopolitical war to a battle between good and evil is an oversimplification. Occasionally it’s not. In this moment, we need to oblige those willing to die for an evil cause, but also give options to those willing to live another way. The brewing global war is between fundamentalism and sanity. You can kill terrorists. But you need another strategy against the fundamentalism. Here’s a must-read Graeme Wood piece in The Atlantic to help us understand what we’re up against: What ISIS Really Wants. “We’ll need to get acquainted with the Islamic State’s intellectual genealogy if we are to react in a way that will not strengthen it, but instead help it self-immolate in its own excessive zeal.”

+ NYT: Beirut, also the site of deadly attacks, feels forgotten. It’s not just Beirut. ISIS has killed or enslaved thousands of people in Iraq and Syria, and has extended the reach of its violence. This is what a year of Islamic State terror looks like.

+ Jeffrey Goldberg: Crimes jihadists will sentence you to death for.