A lobby card for The Tough Guy, 1926. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

• What’s it like to share a name with a Tom Clancy hero and teach at the Naval Academy? “I would be lying if I didn’t say that when I walk out Gate Three of the Academy from time to time—which is the gate that Jack Ryan walks out of during Patriot Gamesand gets shot—that there’s a sense of surrealness to it.”
• Speaking of which, masculinity in art is undergoing a transformation. We’re “questioning yesterday’s tough guys.” Condolences, tough guys!
• In honor of MLK Day, The New Yorkerhas lifted the pay wall on Renata Adler’s 1965 classic “Letter from Selma.”
• What New York’s editors want in a good book: “Are you writing adinosaur erotica novel, or thebook that all dinosaur erotica novels will be measured by?”
• The poet Mamoun Eltlib on writing and reading in Sudan: “You don’t feel it’s a living language; you just feel it’s like a dead language, a bloody language.”
• Now accepting applications for admission: the Yale Writers’ Conference, a summer program with a formidable faculty including Nathaniel Rich, Je Banach, Teddy Wayne, Trey Ellis, Marian Thurm, Colum McCann, Rick Moody, Chuck Klosterman, and others.