The Daily Cartoon by Farley Katz: http://nyr.kr/1slhh6V

+John Cassidy examines President Obama’s decision to launch targeted airstrikes in #Iraq, and asks: “Once the U.S. bombing starts, when will it stop?”

Dan Rosenheck on Argentina’s rational default: “For decades, #Argentina has blamed rapacious foreign financiers for its self-inflicted wounds. But this time, its victim complex is justified.”

“When you think about it, wire walking is very close to what religion is. ... To know, before you take your first step on a wire, that you are going to do the last one—this is a kind of faith.” On the 40th anniversary of Philippe Petit’s World Trade Center wire walk, read Calvin Tomkins’s 1999 piece on the artist.

Elliot Ackerman on the Afghan war: “Cops don’t talk about winning the war against crime. They fight it, but they don’t win it. Kareem and other Afghan commanders with whom I worked thought of war in the same way.”

A humanitarian crisis that could turn into genocide is taking place right now in the mountains of northwestern Iraq. George Packer tells the harrowing story of a Yazidi man’s escape from the brutality of ISIS.

The photographer David Slater argues that he owns the rights to the “monkey selfie,” but does he? +Jay Kang weighs in.

Our cartoon editor Robert Mankoff illustrates Joshua Rothman’s recent post, “What College Can’t Do,” with cartoons: http://nyr.kr/X4LGcK

+John Cassidy has a cure for Rupert Murdoch's ills: a Fox-Viacom merger.

Ruth Margalit on the I.D.F.’s highly controversial protocol known as the Hannibal Directive: “This is the dubious situation that Israel finds itself in: signalling to the military that a dead soldier is preferable to a captive one, while at the same time signalling to the Israeli public that no cost will be spared to secure a captured soldier’s release.”

This morning, after more than ten years of travel, the Rosetta space probe became the first spacecraft to ever orbit a comet.

+John Cassidy on World War I poetry, “which evolved from the upbeat sonnets of Rupert Brooke to the dreadful but somehow beautiful realist imagery of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.”