Vox Sentences: The ISIS battle you should know about

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1. The battle for Kobane

People watch the Syrian town of Kobane from a hill near the Mursitpinar crossing, on the Turkish-Syrian border October 20, 2014 in Suruc, the Sanliurfa province, Turkey. (Gokhan Sahin/Getty Images)

• Turkey will allow Iraqi Kurdish fighters to cross the Turkish-Syrian border to battle ISIS for control over the Syrian border city of Kobane, the first sign of Turkish cooperation in the fight to keep Kobane out of ISIS hands. [NYT / Kareem Fahim and Karam Shoumali]

• Yesterday, the US airdropped small arms and ammunition (and medical supplies) to Kurdish fighters in Kobane. The US has been conducting airstrikes against ISIS forces around the city for about two weeks. [NYT / Eric Schmitt]

• Taking Kobane would give ISIS uninterrupted control of a long stretch of the border, making resupply easier and weakening Kurdish efforts to fight back. [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• But a "senior defense official" told CNN that the Pentagon was skeptical of the battle's importance: "The Pentagon, the official said, believes there's a media outcry about the situation in Kobani because reporters are there. Many other towns have fallen to ISIS without TV crews present, the official said." [CNN / Holly Yan, Michael Pearson and Ingrid Formanek]

• It was tough to get Turkey on board with the Kobane fight because one of the main Syrian Kurdish groups is an offshoot of the PKK, a Kurdish terrorist group that Turkey has been battling for decades (and which it was bombing as recently as last week). [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• Kobane's street-to-street combat doesn't play to ISIS's strengths, analyst Justin Bronk argues. [CNN / Justin Bronk]

• Kurdish fighter Ashraf Ali describes the scene on the border: "Many dead bodies of Islamic States fighters are strewn across street corners, and this is creating a hygiene issue for the children and pregnant women still living inside." [The New Republic / Kiran Nazish]

• Here are some very striking before and after images of what the past month's battle has done to the border region. [Washington Post / Rick Noack]

• ISIS has had considerable success in recruiting women despite enslaving women and using rape as a weapon of war. [Vox / Amanda Taub]

2. Ebola in America, week four

Mayor Mike Rawlings speaks during a news conference about the recent Ebola infections at the Dallas County Administration Building October 20, 2014 in Dallas, Texas. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)

• 43 people who had contact with the first Ebola victim diagnosed in America have been cleared. Only 133 more monitorees (mostly people who had contact with other patients) are left to go. [NYT / Frances Robles]

• Among those cleared was the patient's fiancée, hammering home the point that Ebola is not that easy to catch. [Vox / Julia Belluz]

• Richard Preston, author of the Hot Zone, the book that helped make Ebola famous, describes how researchers are sequencing Ebola's genome in search of clues for how to stop it. [The New Yorker / Richard Preston]

• Why Ebola is scarier than bigger threats like heart disease or car crashes: "people especially fear risks that are new, unfamiliar, involuntarily incurred, potentially catastrophic and apparently uncontrollable." [Bloomberg View / Cass Sunstein]

• Nigeria is officially Ebola-free. [NYT / Nick Cumming-Bruce]

• Helene Cooper, a native Liberian, explains what the outbreak is doing to her home country: "many Liberians are treating the disease with much the same resignation as the killers of the past — accepting that the threat is there, and doing their best to navigate around it." [NYT / Helene Cooper]

• A gorgeous graphical explanation of the outbreak to date. [Involution Studios / Xinyu Liu]

3. Misc. - politics and business

• An argument that Larry Summers kinda sorta caused the current stock downturn. [NYT / Robert Shiller]

• It's hard to pick a best line from Kevin Roose's interview with Netscape founder/venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, but this one reads like his life motto: "I can tell you, at least from the last 20 years, if you bet on the side of the optimists, generally you’re right." [NY Mag / Kevin Roose]

• Monica Lewinsky joined Twitter and the hordes were as horrible to her as you'd expect. [The New Republic / Rebecca Leber]

• When India tried to ban child labor, the wage rate for children fell and they just wound up working longer hours. Giving households with children cash seems to work better. [Businessweek / Charles Kenny]

• The head of the New York Fed suggests breaking up the big banks if they don't shape up. [Financial Times / Gina Chon]

• A Republican midterm win could be good for Obama in at least one way — he'd be likelier to get fast track authority to cut the trade deals he'd like. [Financial Times / Shawn Donnan]

4. Misc. - science, art and culture

HI-SEAS, the Hawaii-based Mars mission simulation program. (HI-SEAS)

• The case for subscribing to Wikipedia: "I consider it a subscription fee to an indispensable and irreplaceable resource I use dozens of times weekly." [Jason Kottke]

• NASA is having groups of six people live together in a dome in Hawaii to see how tenable the isolation of a Mars mission would be. [NYT / Kenneth Chang]

• How #GamerGate activists are intimidating news outlets by targeting advertisers. [Washington Post / Caitlin Dewey]

• Ketamine is best known as a club drug but evidence is beginning to accumulate suggesting it's effective against depression. [NIMH]

• Just how much does it hurt consumers when Amazon refuses to sell a book? [Tyler Cowen]

• Sleater-Kinney is getting back together, releasing a new album and going on tour. Here is their new song "Bury Our Friends.". Here is where to buy tickets (they go on sale at 9am Tuesday). Here is their best song if you're not a fan already. [Stereogum / Chris DeVille]

• Tom Hanks has a story in The New Yorker, and Katy Waldman is not impressed. [Slate / Katy Waldman]

5. Verbatim

• "I'm much more likely to be mistakenly killed by a police officer in this county than to be killed by Ebola." [Vox / Ohio resident Peter Pattakos, as quoted by Cleveland Plain-Dealer]

• "My son’s practice conversation with Siri is translating into more facility with actual humans." [NYT / Judith Newman]

• "Most British people highly value and feel that they need Marmite, which I would describe as a disgusting yeasty salty paste that spoils any piece of bread onto which it is spread." [The New Republic / Martha Nussbaum]

• "The waning days of our lives are given over to treatments that addle our brains and sap our bodies for a sliver’s chance of benefit." [NY Mag / Atul Gawande]

• "I have never heard a gun go off in real life; here is a mildly provocative article about food." [The Toast / Mallory Ortberg]