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Here are some details about Lynda Barry that didn’t appear in her autobiographical song. She’s a cartoonist whose weekly strip, “Ernie Pook’s Comeek,” was a staple of alternative newsweeklies for almost 30 years. (Next month, the publisher Drawn & Quarterly will release “Blabber Blabber Blabber,”  the first in a 10-volume retrospective series of her work.) She dips Copenhagen tobacco and fights against wind farms. She e-mails stupid YouTube links to her old buddy Matt Groening, the creator of “The Simpsons.”

Barry reinvented herself as a creativity guru as the market for her comic strip dried up, publishing two boundary-blurring books on inspiration and teaching writing workshops for nonwriters. Barry’s advertising copy is clear: “THIS CLASS WORKS ESPECIALLY WELL FOR ‘NONWRITERS’ like bartenders, janitors, office workers, hairdressers, musicians and ANYONE who has given up on ‘being a writer’ but still wonders what it might be like to write.”

“Lynda Barry Will Make You Believe In Yourself.” — Dan Kois, The New York Times Magazine

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Murakami has always considered himself an outsider in his own country. He was born into one of the strangest sociopolitical environments in history: Kyoto in 1949 — the former imperial capital of Japan in the middle of America’s postwar occupation. “It would be difficult to find another cross-cultural moment,” the historian John W. Dower has written of late-1940s Japan, “more intense, unpredictable, ambiguous, confusing, and electric than this one.” Substitute “fiction” for “moment” in that sentence and you have a perfect description of Murakami’s work. The basic structure of his stories — ordinary life lodged between incompatible worlds — is also the basic structure of his first life experience.

“The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami.” — Sam Anderson, New York Times Magazine

See also: “Town of Cats.” by Haruki Murakami in The New Yorker, Sept. 5 2011

Featured Longreader: Writer/editor Dan Kois. See his story picks from The New York Times Magazine, The Awl, New York Magazine and more on his #longreads page.

Featured Longreader: Josh Barone, asst. news editor at the Columbia Missourian. See his story picks from Esquire, Rolling Stone, The New York Times and more on his #longreads page.

The elders estimated that more than 100 families had fled Shahabuddin because of the local police. The people were defenseless, they said, and indeed they all seemed cowed and frightened. But before we parted ways, one of them, with a note of defiance, assured me: “Nur-ul Haq has no place in this province. As long as the foreign troops are here, he is king. The minute they go, he should leave the country.” Another agreed: “I bet he can’t stay for one night in Baghlan if there are no foreign troops.” Grinning at the prospect, the old man added, “The people will rise against him.”

“Bad Guys vs. Worse Guys in Afghanistan.” — Luke Mogelson, New York Times Magazine

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Featured Longreader: Erie Times-News reporter Catherine Cloutier. See her story picks from The New York Times, Boston.com, and more on her #longreads page.

This June, the paper’s publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., announced the appointment of Abramson and of Dean Baquet, who is black, as the new managing editor. Many who gathered in the newsroom that day were thinking of this history. Not a few women cried. Susan Chira, an assistant managing editor, says that she kept thinking that when she joined the Times, in 1981, manyTimes women were “sad, bitter, angry people who were talented but who had been thwarted.” Editors openly propositioned young women. “I can’t believe how far we’ve come. To see Jill take the mantle, I felt tingling. You have to praise and savor when a woman can earn it through merit. No tokenism here. Jill studied for this job. She earned it.”

“Changing Times.” — Ken Auletta, The New Yorker

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Featured Longreader: Mandy C., a foreign relations junkie. See her story picks from The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and more on her #longreads page.

“I’ve been waiting,” Echols wrote her. “I knew that sooner or later someone would take notice… . Do you have any idea how it feels to be called a killer by everyone who sees you, even though you know you’re innocent? I go through hell every day, sitting here waiting to die for something I didn’t do. It’s a nightmare… .”

“A Death-Row Love Story.” — Geoffrey Gray, The New York Times Magazine

More from Geoffrey Gray: “Boss Kelly.” New York magazine, May 16, 2010

Longtime Republicans have been satisfied enough to have their candidates run down activist government as a campaign tactic, even as they themselves retained a more nuanced view of the federal government’s role (which is why a Republican Congress, working with a Republican president, managed to pass a Medicaidprescription-drug bill in 2003). But when you talk to them now, these same Republicans seem positively baffled that anyone could have actually internalized, so literally, all the scorching resentment for government that has come to define the modern conservative campaign.

“Does Anyone Have a Grip on the G.O.P.?” — Matt Bai, New York Times Magazine

See more #longreads from Matt Bai