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Featured Longreader: Doug Coulson, lawyer, and English Ph.D. candidate at UT-Austin. See his story picks from the Pen American Center, Guernica Magazine, and more on his #longreads page.

To slip past censors, Chinese bloggers have become masters of comic subterfuge, cloaking their messages in protective layers of irony and satire. This is not a new concept, but it has erupted so powerfully that it now defines the ethos of the Internet in China. Coded language has become part of mainstream culture, with the most contagious memes tapping into widely shared feelings about issues that cannot be openly discussed, from corruption and economic inequality to censorship itself. “Beyond its comic value, this humor shows where netizens are pushing against the boundaries of the state,” says Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley, whose Web site, China Digital Times, maintains an entertaining lexicon of coded Internet terms. “Nothing else gives us a clearer view of the pressure points in Chinese society.”

“Where an Internet Joke Is Not Just a Joke.” — Brook Larmer, New York Times Magazine

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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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Tonight, in a modest brick row house in the sleepy city of Carthage, beyond the Ozark Mountains and the mines of southwest Missouri, past the poultry plants and churches along Interstate 44 and U.S. 71, down the block from the Jasper County courthouse and historic town square, a five-year-old boy is going to bed.

Chances are the boy is unaware of the battery of lawyers debating his future. He’s probably oblivious to the national immigration debates he has stirred, the newspaper headlines he has generated, the two school-district employees whose firings are directly linked to his circumstances. He very likely has no idea that the Guatemalan Embassy in Washington, D.C., is in his corner, or that a lone circuit court judge will decide his fate this winter.

“In a tiny town just outside Joplin, a landmark adoption case tests the limits of inalienable human rights.” — John H. Tucker, Riverfront Times

See also “Parents of a Certain Age.” Lisa Miller, New York Magazine, Sept. 26, 2011

[Fiction]

Grit was dead. There was no mistake about that. And on the very day of his burial temptation came to his widow.

Grit’s widow was “Great” Taylor, whose inadequate first name was Nell—a young, immaculate creature whose body was splendid even if her vision and spirit were small. She never had understood Grit.

Returning from the long, wearisome ride, she climbed the circular iron staircase—up through parallels of garlic-scented tenement gloom—to her three-room flat, neat as a pin; but not even then did she give way to tears. Tears! No man could make Great Taylor weep!

“Grit.” Tristram Tupper, Metropolitan Magazine (March, 1921) — Pen/O. Henry Prize

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Featured Longreader: Bloomberg News writer Elizabeth Lopatto. See her story picks from The Atlantic, Cabinet Magazine and more on her #longreads page.

Over the past decade or more, Shanghai has grown like no other city on the planet. Home to 13.3 million residents in 1990, the city now has some 23 million residents (to New York City’s 8.1 million), with half a million newcomers each year. To handle the influx, developers are planning to build, among other developments, seven satellite cities on the fringes of Shanghai’s 2,400 square miles. Shanghai opened its first subway line in 1995; today it has 11; by 2025, there will be 22. In 2004, the city also opened the world’s first commercial high-speed magnetic levitation train line.

“Shanghai Gets Supersized.” — David DeVoss and Lauren Hilgers, Smithsonian Magazine

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What’s as intriguing as Occupy Wall Street itself is that once again our Establishment, left, right, and center, did not see the wave coming or understand what it meant as it broke. Maybe it’s just human nature and the power of denial, or maybe it’s a stubborn strain of all-­American optimism, but at each aftershock since the fall of Lehman Brothers, those at the top have preferred not to see what they didn’t want to see. And so for the first three weeks, the protests were alternately ignored, patronized, dismissed, and insulted by politicians and the mainstream news media as a neo-Woodstock for wannabe collegiate rebels without a cause—and not just in Fox-land. CNN’s new prime-time hopeful, Erin Burnett, ridiculed the protesters as bongo-playing know-nothings; a dispatch in The New Republic called them “an unfocused rabble of ragtag discontents.” Those who did express sympathy for Occupy Wall Street tended to pat it on the head before going on to fault it for being leaderless, disorganized, and inchoate in its agenda.

“The Class War Has Begun.” — Frank Rich, New York 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.