The obituary that 93-year-old John Roderick deemed “worth dying for,” and a 2006 piece on being a China watcher during Mao’s purge. Terrain.org includes the first chapter of his last book, Minka: My Farmhouse in Japan, in its latest issue (a PDF file): “On the afternoon of Sunday December 7, 1941, I began to hate Japan and the Japanese, a nation and a race I hardly knew.” David Briscoe reviews it. The world’s best marathoner decides China is no place for marathons. Depending on whom you ask, Beijing is either making it easier or harder for journalists to cover the National People’s Congress. The Economist is there, translating Wen Jiabao’s “改革开放,” gaige kaifang, as a call to “liberate our thinking.” A blogger translates a story about Wen’s neighbors being liberated from their homes. And Danwei translates the foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, who says translation is the easiest thing in the world. Next thing, the ministry is throwing interference at the Dalai Lama: a video of spokesman Qin Gang urging him to “fully grasp reality.” In the opposite corner,  three…  different…  views of Bjork chanting “Tibet” during her song “Declare Independence” in Shanghai, which had vice culture minister Zhou Heping wishing foreign artists would “not do things against our laws or feelings.” A 1997 interview with His Holiness in Mother Jones, and an underwear salesman who had a vision: “I was in the pool and I saw the Dalai Lama carrying the Olympic torch across the sky… with sound.”