The promise of the American food supply is that you can eat anything and not get sick. You can usually assume that whatever you buy from a grocery store or fast-food joint won’t land you in a hospital.

But lately, foodborne-illness outbreaks seem to be distressingly regular. On Tuesday, the CDC reported 49 cases and one death linked to McDonald’s Quarter Pounders tainted with E. coli. In the past week, hundreds of waffle and pancake products were voluntarily recalled due to potential Listeria contamination. Listeria in particular has been a problem of late: Earlier in October, more than 11 million pounds of ready-to-eat meat and poultry products were recalled. And an especially bad Listeria outbreak involving Boar’s Head deli-meat products has led to 59 hospitalizations across 10 states and 10 deaths.

Many of this year’s outbreaks have occurred in foods that are preprepared—those that can be eaten as-is, without further cooking. Foods such as Quarter Pounders and waffles, yes, but also cold cuts, prepackaged salads, and jarred salsa are popular because they are convenient. That convenience comes at a cost. A rule of thumb in food safety is that “the more a food is handled prior to consumption, the higher the chances it can be contaminated,” Lawrence Goodridge, the director of the Canadian Research Institute for Food Safety, told me. Americans are left with a difficult choice: save time or risk getting sick.

Many bacteria that cause foodborne illness live among us. Listeria can be found in soil and water, and E. coli and Salmonella are normally found in human and animal digestive tracts. They become a problem when they get into food. Preprepared foods are particularly prone to contamination because they are usually processed in large, sometimes even multiple, facilities where microbes have lots of opportunities to spread. “Somebody, somewhere, or a company, has produced the food so that we don’t have to do it at home,” Goodridge said. A factory worker with mud on his shoe, or an employee who didn’t wash her hands after using the bathroom, can be all it takes to start an outbreak. Food-safety practices—such as regular cleaning, temperature control, and strict hygiene standards—are supposed to keep these factories pristine. But occasionally, they fail.

Refrigerated facilities keep most bacteria at bay—microbes grow more slowly at lower temperatures—but not Listeria, which thrives in cool conditions. Given enough time to grow, a Listeria colony forms a protective gel over itself, called a biofilm, which makes it especially difficult to get rid of. Meanwhile, E. coli typically gets into produce through water soiled with feces. Usually, contamination occurs at the farm level, but microbes can spread as fresh foods are processed into products such as precut fruit, bags of chopped lettuce, and even prewashed whole greens. When clean produce is washed together with a contaminated batch or sliced with the same equipment, bacteria can spread. Many foods are produced in a central location and then shipped cross-country, which is how a contamination event at a single farm can lead to illnesses nationwide.

This may be the reason for the ongoing Quarter Pounder debacle. According to McDonald’s, the E. coli outbreak may be linked to slivered onions, which were sourced from a single supplier that served certain McDonald’s locations in 10 states, as well as some Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut stores. Centralizing the slivering of onions no doubt increases efficiency at fast-food chains. But it also raises the risk of contamination.

In food safety, cooking is known as a “kill step,” because high heat kills most dangerous pathogens. Precut salads and fruit are usually eaten raw. Nobody cooks cold cuts, even though the CDC recommends heating them until they are steaming (who knew?). Even convenience products that are meant to be heated, such as frozen waffles and vegetables, aren’t always prepared properly at home. A toaster may not get a waffle hot enough—Listeria is killed at an internal temperature of 165 degrees Fahrenheit—and thawed frozen vegetables may be eaten without being boiled first, Barbara Kowalcyk, a food-safety expert at George Washington University, told me.

To be clear, there’s no need for Listeria hysteria. “On the surface, it looks like there are many more outbreaks,” but there are no data to prove that yet, Goodridge said. Still, some recent outbreaks demonstrate that precautions are working as they should. Listeria was identified in a regular sweep of the waffle factory and products were voluntarily recalled; no cases of illness have been reported. Tools for detecting outbreaks are becoming more sophisticated, Darin Detwiler, a food-safety expert at Northeastern University, told me. A technique called whole-genome sequencing can identify instances in which people have been sickened by the same bacteria, pinpointing the source of an outbreak. Earlier this year, it was used to investigate a Listeria outbreak in Canada that killed three people and hospitalized 15.

No food is totally safe from contamination. Practically everything sold in stores or restaurants is handled in some way. Milk is pooled from any number of cows, then pasteurized and packaged. Hamburger patties are usually made with meat from many butchered cows that is then ground, seasoned, and formed. People get lulled into the idea that “the U.S. has the safest food supply in the world,” Kowalcyk said, “but that doesn’t mean that it’s safe.” People can reduce their risk of contracting a foodborne illness by buying whole foods and cooking from scratch when possible, Goodbridge said; it’s probably safer to clean and chop your own head of lettuce. Yet even that is not a guarantee. Foodborne illness also spreads in home kitchens, where cross-contamination of raw meat with other foods, unsafe storage, and food spoilage often occurs. The risks are lower for healthy people, who can usually get through foodborne illness without excessive discomfort. But for vulnerable groups—very young, very old, and pregnant people—foodborne illness can lead to hospitalization, and even death.

The recent spate of outbreaks highlights the dilemma plaguing the state of American eating. People are simply too busy and exhausted to cook from scratch. In the daily scramble to get dinner on the table, ready-to-eat food is a lifeline. But with every additional stage of preparation comes an extra helping of risk.

The two nations are locked in a fierce row over murder plot allegations

The government says it "didn't get the balance quite right" when it bolstered immigration to address labour shortages.

The immigration controls will limit the country to 1.1 million newcomers over the next three years.

Two of them were sprawled out on a long concrete bench in front of the main Haverford College library, one scribbling in a battered spiral-ring notebook, the other making annotations in the white margins of a novel. Three more sat on the ground beneath them, crisscross-applesauce, chatting about classes. A little hip, a little nerdy, a little tattooed; unmistakably English majors. The scene had the trappings of a campus-movie set piece: blue skies, green greens, kids both working and not working, at once anxious and carefree.

I said I was sorry to interrupt them, and they were kind enough to pretend that I hadn’t. I explained that I’m a writer, interested in how artificial intelligence is affecting higher education, particularly the humanities. When I asked whether they felt that ChatGPT-assisted cheating was common on campus, they looked at me like I had three heads. “I’m an English major,” one told me. “I want to write.” Another added: “Chat doesn’t write well anyway. It sucks.” A third chimed in, “What’s the point of being an English major if you don’t want to write?” They all murmured in agreement.

What’s the point, indeed? The conventional wisdom is that the American public has lost faith in the humanities—and lost both competence and interest in reading and writing, possibly heralding a post-literacy age. And since the emergence of ChatGPT, which can produce long-form responses to short prompts, universities have tried, rather unsuccessfully, to stamp out the use of what has become the ultimate piece of cheating technology, resulting in a mix of panic and resignation about the influence AI will have on education. But at Haverford, the story seemed different. Walking onto campus was like stepping into a time machine, and not only because I had graduated from the school a decade earlier. The tiny, historically Quaker college on Philadelphia’s Main Line still maintains its old honor code, and students still seem to follow it instead of letting a large language model do their thinking for them. For the most part, the students and professors I talked with seemed totally unfazed by this supposedly threatening new technology.

[Read: The best way to prevent cheating in college]

The two days I spent at Haverford and nearby Bryn Mawr College, in addition to interviews with people at other colleges with honor codes, left me convinced that the main question about AI in higher education has little to do with what kind of academic assignments the technology is or is not capable of replacing. The challenge posed by ChatGPT for American colleges and universities is not primarily technological but cultural and economic.

It is cultural because stemming the use of Chat—as nearly every student I interviewed referred to ChatGPT—requires an atmosphere in which a credible case is made, on a daily basis, that writing and reading have a value that transcends the vagaries of this or that particular assignment or résumé line item or career milestone. And it is economic because this cultural infrastructure isn’t free: Academic honor and intellectual curiosity do not spring from some inner well of rectitude we call “character,” or at least they do not spring only from that. Honor and curiosity can be nurtured, or crushed, by circumstance.

Rich private colleges with honor codes do not have a monopoly on academic integrity—millions of students and faculty at cash-strapped public universities around the country are also doing their part to keep the humanities alive in the face of generative AI. But at the wealthy schools that have managed to keep AI at bay, institutional resources play a central role in their success. The structures that make Haverford’s honor code function—readily available writing support, small classes, and comparatively unharried faculty—are likely not scalable in a higher-education landscape characterized by yawning inequalities, collapsing tenure-track employment, and the razing of public education at both the primary and secondary levels.

When OpenAI’s ChatGPT launched on November 30, 2022, colleges and universities were returning from Thanksgiving break. Professors were caught flat-footed as students quickly began using the generative-AI wonder app to cut corners on assignments, or to write them outright. Within a few weeks of the program’s release, ChatGPT was heralded as bringing about “the end of high-school English” and the death of the college essay. These early predictions were hyperbolic, but only just. As The Atlantic’s Ian Bogost recently argued, there has been effectively zero progress in stymying AI cheating in the years since. One professor summarized the views of many in a recent mega-viral X post: “I am no longer a teacher. I’m just a human plagiarism detector. I used to spend my grading time giving comments for improving writing skills. Now most of that time is just checking to see if a student wrote their own paper.”

While some institutions and faculty have bristled at the encroachment of AI, others have simply thrown in the towel, insisting that we need to treat large language models like “tools” to be “integrated” into the classroom.  

I’ve felt uneasy about the tacit assumption that ChatGPT plagiarism is inevitable, that it is human nature to seek technological shortcuts. In my experience as a student at Haverford and then a professor at a small liberal-arts college in Maine, most students genuinely do want to learn and generally aren’t eager to outsource their thinking and writing to a machine. Although I had my own worries about AI, I was also not sold on the idea that it’s impossible to foster a community in which students resist ChatGPT in favor of actually doing the work. I returned to Haverford last month to see whether my fragile optimism was warranted.

When I stopped a professor walking toward the college’s nature trail to ask if ChatGPT was an issue at Haverford, she appeared surprised by the question: “I’m probably not the right person to ask. That’s a question for students, isn’t it?” Several other faculty members I spoke with said they didn’t think much about ChatGPT and cheating, and repeated variations of the phrase I’m not the police.

Haverford’s academic climate is in part a product of its cultural and religious history. During my four years at the school, invocations of “Quaker values” were constant, emphasizing on personal responsibility, humility, and trust in other members of the community. Discussing grades was taboo because it invited competition and distracted from the intrinsic value of learning.

The honor code is the most concrete expression of Haverford’s Quaker ethos. Students are trusted to take tests without proctors and even to bring exams back to their dorm rooms. Matthew Feliz, a fellow Haverford alum who is now a visiting art-history professor at Bryn Mawr—a school also governed by an honor code—put it this way: “The honor code is a kind of contract. And that contract gives students the benefit of the doubt. That’s the place we always start from: giving students the benefit of the doubt.”

[Read: The first year of AI college ends in ruin ]

Darin Hayton, a historian of science at the college, seemed to embody this untroubled attitude. Reclining in his office chair, surrounded by warm wood and, for 270 degrees, well-loved books, he said of ChatGPT, “I just don’t give a shit about it.” He explained that his teaching philosophy is predicated on modeling the merits of a life of deep thinking, reading, and writing. “I try to show students the value of what historians do. I hope they’re interested, but if they’re not, that’s okay too.” He relies on creating an atmosphere in which students want to do their work, and at Haverford, he said, they mostly do. Hayton was friendly, animated, and radiated a kind of effortless intelligence. I found myself, quite literally, leaning forward when he spoke. It was not hard to believe that his students did the same.

“It seems to me that this anxiety in our profession over ChatGPT isn’t ultimately about cheating.” Kim Benston, a literary historian at Haverford and a former president of the college, told me. “It’s an existential anxiety that reflects a deeper concern about the future of the humanities,” he continued. Another humanities professor echoed these remarks, saying that he didn’t personally worry about ChatGPT but agreed that the professorial concern about AI was, at bottom, a fear of becoming irrelevant: “We are in the sentence-making business. And it looks like they don’t need us to make sentences any more.”

I told Benston that I had struggled with whether to continue assigning traditional essays—and risk the possibility of students using ChatGPT—or resort to using in-class, pen-and-paper exams. I’d decided that literature classes without longer, take-home essays are not literature classes. He nodded. The impulse to surveil students, to view all course activity through a paranoid lens, and to resort to cheating-proof assignments was not only about the students or their work, he suggested. These measures were also about nervous humanities professors proving to themselves that they’re still necessary.

My conversations with students convinced me that Hayton, Benston, and their colleagues’ build-it-and-they-will-come sentiment, hopelessly naive though it may seem, was largely correct. Of the dozens of Haverford students I talked with, not a single one said they thought AI cheating was a substantial problem at the school. These interviews were so repetitive, they almost became boring.

The jock sporting bright bruises from some kind of contact sport? “Haverford students don’t really cheat.” The econ major in prepster shorts and a Jackson Hole T-shirt? “Students follow the honor code.” A bubbly first-year popping out of a dorm? “So far I haven’t heard of anyone using ChatGPT. At my high school it was everywhere!” More than a few students seemed off put by the very suggestion that a Haverfordian might cheat. “There is a lot of freedom here and a lot of student autonomy,” a sophomore psychology major told me. “This is a place where you could get away with it if you wanted to. And because of that, I think students are very careful not to abuse that freedom.” The closest I got to a dissenting voice was a contemplative senior who mused: “The honor code is definitely working for now. It may not be working two years from now as ChatGPT gets better. But for now there’s still a lot of trust between students and faculty.”

To be sure, despite that trust, Haverford does have occasional issues with ChatGPT. A student who serves on Haverford’s honor council, which is responsible for handling academic-integrity cases, told me, “There’s generally not too much cheating at Haverford, but it happens.” He said that the primary challenge is that “ChatGPT makes it easy to lie,” meaning the honor council struggles to definitively prove that a student who is suspected of cheating used AI. Still, both he and a fellow member of the council agreed that Haverford seems to have far fewer issues with LLM cheating than peer institutions. Only a single AI case came before the honor council over the past year.

In another sign that LLMs may be preoccupying some people at the college, one survey of the literature and language faculty found that most teachers in these fields banned AI outright, according to the librarian who distributed the query. A number of professors also mentioned that a provost had recently sent out an email survey about AI use on campus. But in keeping with the general disinterest in ChatGPT I encountered at Haverford, no one I talked with seemed to have paid much attention to the email.

Wandering over to Bryn Mawr in search of new perspectives, I found a similar story. A Classics professor I bumped into by a bus stop told me, “I try not to be suspicious of students. ChatGPT isn’t something I spend time worrying about. I think if they use ChatGPT, they’re robbing themselves of an opportunity.” When I smiled, perhaps a little too knowingly, he added: “Of course a professor would say that, but I think our students really believe that too.” Bryn Mawr students seemed to take the honor code every bit as seriously as that professor believed they would, perhaps none more passionately than a pair of transfer students I came across, posted up under one of the college’s gothic stone archways.

“The adherence to it to me has been shocking,” a senior who transferred from the University of Pittsburgh said of the honor code. “I can’t believe how many people don’t just cheat. It feels not that hard to [cheat] because there’s so much faith in students.” She explained her theory of why Bryn Mawr’s honor code hadn’t been challenged by ChatGPT: “Prior to the proliferation of AI it was already easy to cheat, and they didn’t, and so I think they continue not to.” Her friend, a transfer from another large state university, agreed. “I also think it’s a point of pride,” she observed. “People take pride in their work here, whereas students at my previous school were only there to get their degree and get out.”

The testimony of these transfer students most effectively made the case that schools with strong honor codes really are different. But the contrast the students pointed to—comparatively affordable public schools where AI cheating is ubiquitous, gilded private schools where it is not—also hinted at a reality that troubles whatever moralistic spin we might want to put on the apparent success of Haverford and Bryn Mawr. Positioning honor codes as a bulwark against academic misconduct in a post-AI world is too easy: You have to also acknowledge that schools like Haverford have dismantled—through the prodigious resources of the institution and its customers—many incentives to cheat.

It is one thing to eschew ChatGPT when your professors are available for office hours, and on-campus therapists can counsel you if you’re stressed out by an assignment, and tutors are ready to lend a hand if writer’s block strikes or confusion sets in, and one of your parents’ doctor friends is happy to write you an Adderall prescription if all else fails. It is another to eschew ChatGPT when you’re a single mother trying to squeeze in homework between shifts, or a non-native English speaker who has nowhere else to turn for a grammar check. Sarah Eaton, an expert on cheating and plagiarism at Canada’s University of Calgary, didn’t mince words: She called ChatGPT “a poor person’s tutor.” Indeed, several Haverford students mentioned that, although the honor code kept students from cheating, so too did the well-staffed writing center. “The writing center is more useful than ChatGPT anyway,” one said. “If I need help, I go there.”

But while these kinds of institutional resources matter, they’re also not the whole story. The decisive factor seems to be whether a university’s honor code is deeply woven into the fabric of campus life, or is little more than a policy slapped on a website. Tricia Bertram Gallant, an expert on cheating and a co-author of a forthcoming book on academic integrity, argues that honor codes are effective when they are “regularly made salient.” Two professors I spoke with at public universities that have strong honor codes emphasized this point. Thomas Crawford at Georgia Tech told me, “Honor codes are a two-way street—students are expected to be honest and produce their own work, but for the system to function, the faculty must trust those same students.” John Casteen, a former president and current English professor at the University of Virginia, said, “We don’t build suspicion into our educational model.” He acknowledged that there will always be some cheaters in any system, but in his experience UVA’s honor-code culture “keeps most students honest, most of the time.”

And if money and institutional resources are part of what makes honor codes work, recent developments at other schools also show that money can’t buy culture. Last spring, owing to increased cheating, Stanford’s governing bodies moved to end more than a century of unproctored exams, using what some called a “nuclear option” to override a student-government vote against the decision. A campus survey at Middlebury this year found that 65 percent of the students who responded said they’d broken the honor code, leading to a report that asserted, “The Honor Code has ceased to be a meaningful element of learning and living at Middlebury for most students.” An article by the school newspaper’s editorial board shared this assessment: “The Honor Code as it currently stands clearly does not effectively deter students from cheating. Nor does it inspire commitment to the ideals it is meant to represent such as integrity and trust.” Whether schools like Haverford can continue to resist these trends remains to be seen.

Last month, Fredric Jameson, arguably America’s preeminent living literary critic, passed away. His interests spanned, as a lengthy New York Times obituary noted, architecture, German opera, and sci-fi. An alumnus of Haverford, he was perhaps the greatest reader and writer the school ever produced.

[Read: The decade in which everything was great but felt terrible]

If Jameson was a singular talent, he was also the product of a singular historical moment in American education. He came up at a time when funding for humanities research was robust, tenure-track employment was relatively available, and the humanities were broadly popular with students and the public. His first major work of criticism, Marxism and Form, was published in 1971, a year that marked the high point of the English major: 7.6 percent of all students graduating from four-year American colleges and universities majored in English. Half a century later, that number cratered to 2.8 percent, humanities research funding slowed, and tenure-line employment in the humanities all but imploded.

Our higher-education system may not be capable of producing or supporting Fredric Jamesons any longer, and in a sense it is hard to blame students for resorting to ChatGPT. Who is telling them that reading and writing matter? America’s universities all too often treat teaching history, philosophy, and literature as part-time jobs, reducing professors to the scholarly equivalent of Uber drivers in an academic gig economy. America’s politicians, who fund public education, seem to see the humanities as an economically unproductive diversion for hobbyists at best, a menace to society at worst.

Haverford is a place where old forms of life, with all their wonder, are preserved for those privileged enough to visit, persisting in the midst of a broader world from which those same forms of life are disappearing. This trend did not start with OpenAI in November 2022, but it is being accelerated by the advent of magic machines that automate—imperfectly, for now—both reading and writing.

At the end of my trip, before heading to the airport, I walked to the Wawa, a 15-minute trek familiar to any self-respecting Haverford student, in search of a convenience-store sub and a bad coffee. On my way, I passed by the duck pond. On an out-of-the-way bench overlooking the water feature, in the shadow of a tree well older than she was, a student was sitting, her brimming backpack on the grass. There was a curl of smoke issued from a cigarette, or something slightly stronger, and a thick book open on her lap, face bent so close to the page her nose was almost touching it. With her free hand a finger traced the words, line by line, as she read.

In the months leading up to a presidential election, bookstores fill with campaign memoirs. These titles are, for the most part, ghostwritten. They are devoid of psychological insights and bereft of telling moments, instead typically giving their readers the most stilted of self-portraits, produced in hackish haste. They are, really, a pretext for an aspirant’s book tour and perhaps an appearance on The View—in essence, a campaign advertisement squeezed between two covers.

But these self-serving vehicles shouldn’t indict the larger genre of political autobiography. Truly excellent books have been written about statecraft and power from the inside. And few professions brim with more humanity, in all of its flawed majesty: Politicians must confront both the irresistible temptations of high office and the inevitable shattering of high ideals, which means that they supply some very good stories. After all, some of the world’s most important writers began as failed leaders and frustrated government officials—think Niccolò Machiavelli, Nikolai Gogol, and Alexis de Tocqueville.

The books on this list were published years ago, but their distance from the present moment makes them so much more interesting than the quickies that have been churned out for the current election season. Several of them are set abroad, yet the essential moral questions about power that they document are universal. Each is a glimpse into the mind and character of those attracted to the most noble and the most crazed of professions, and offers a bracing reminder of the virtues and dangers of political life.

Fire and Ashes, by Michael Ignatieff

Intellectuals can’t help themselves. They look at the buffoons and dimwits who speechify on the stump and think, I can do better. Take Michael Ignatieff, who briefly ditched his life as a Harvard professor and journalist to become the head of Canada’s Liberal Party. In 2011, at the age of 64, he ran for prime minister—and led his party to its worst defeat since its founding in 1867. In Fire and Ashes, his memoir of his brief political career, he writes about the humiliations of the campaign trail, and his own disastrous performance on it, in the spirit of self-abasement. (The best section of the book is about the confusing indignities—visits to the dry cleaner, driving his own car—of returning to everyday life after leaving politics.) In the course of losing, Ignatieff acquired a profound new respect for the gritty business of politics and all the nose counting, horse trading, and baby kissing it requires. His crashing defeat is the stuff of redemption, having forced him to appreciate the rituals of the political vocation that he once dismissed as banal.

[Michael Ignatieff: Why would anyone become a politician?]

Witness, by Whittaker Chambers

This 1952 memoir is still thrust in the hands of budding young conservatives, as a means of inculcating them into the movement. Published during an annus mirabilis for conservative treatises, just as the American right was beginning to emerge in its modern incarnation, Witness is draped in apocalyptic rhetoric about the battle for the future of mankind—a style that helped establish the Manichaean mentality of postwar conservatism. But the book is more than an example of an outlook: It tells a series of epic stories. Chambers narrates his time as an underground Communist activist in the ’30s, a fascinating tale of subterfuge. An even larger stretch of the book is devoted to one of the great spectacles in modern American politics, the Alger Hiss affair. In 1948, after defecting from his sect, Chambers delivered devastating testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee accusing Hiss, a former State Department official and a paragon of the liberal establishment, of being a Soviet spy. History vindicates Chambers’s version of events, and his propulsive storytelling withstands the test of time.

Life So Far, by Betty Friedan

Humans have a deep longing to canonize political heroes as saints. But many successful activists are unpleasant human beings—frequently, in fact, royal pains in the ass. Nobody did more than Friedan to popularly advance the cause of feminism in the 1960s, but her method consisted of stubborn obstreperousness and an unstinting faith in her own righteousness. Her memoir is both a disturbing account of her marriage to an abusive man and the inside story of the founding of the National Organization for Women. Friedan’s charmingly self-aware prose provides a window into how feminist ideas were translated into an agenda—and a peek into the mind of one of America’s most effective, if occasionally self-defeating, reformers.

[Read: Melania really doesn’t care]

Palimpsest, by Gore Vidal

Vidal wrote some of the greatest American novels about politics—Burr, Lincoln, 1876. In this magnificently malicious memoir, he trains that political acumen on himself. He could write so vividly about the salons, cloakrooms, and dark corridors of Washington because he extracted texture, color, and understanding from his own life. His grandfather was T. P. Gore, a senator from Oklahoma. Jacqueline Onassis was his relative by marriage, and he writes about growing up alongside her on the banks of the Potomac. And for years, he baldly admits, he harbored the illusion that he might become a great politician himself, unsuccessfully running for Congress in 1960, and then for Senate in 1982. Vidal didn’t have a politician’s temperament, to say the least: He lived to feud. Robert F. Kennedy became Vidal’s nemesis after kicking him out of the White House for an embarrassing display of drunkenness; William F. Buckley, whom Vidal debated live in prime time during the political conventions of 1968, was another hated rival. The critic John Lahr once said that “no one quite pisses from the height that Vidal does,” which is pretty much the perfect blurb for this journey into a mind bursting with schadenfreude, hauteur, and an abiding affection for politics.

This Child Will Be Great, by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

In defeat, Ignatieff came to appreciate the nobility of politics. The life of Liberia’s Sirleaf, Africa’s first elected female president—or, to borrow a cliché, “Africa’s Iron Lady”—is closer to the embodiment of that ideal. She led Liberia after suffering under the terrifying reigns of Samuel Doe and Charles Taylor, who corruptly governed their country; Taylor notoriously built an army of child soldiers and used rape as a weapon. As a leader of the opposition to these despots, Sirleaf survived imprisonment, exile, and an abusive husband. She narrowly avoided execution at the hands of a firing squad. Her literary style is modest, sometimes wonky—she’s a trained economist—but her memoir contains the complicated, tragic story of a nation, which she describes as “a conundrum wrapped in complexity and stuffed inside a paradox.” (That story is, in fact, a damning indictment of U.S. foreign policy.) Her biography is electrifying, an urgently useful example of persistence in the face of despair.

[Read: A dissident is built different]

Cold Cream, by Ferdinand Mount

Only a fraction of this hilarious, gorgeous memoir is about politics, but it’s so delightful that it merits a place on this list. Like Vidal and Igantieff, Mount is an intellectual who tried his hand at electoral politics. But when he ran for the British Parliament as a Tory, he had shortcomings: He spoke with “a languid gabble that communicated all too vividly my inner nervous state … I found myself overcome with boredom by the sound of my own voice. This sudden sensation of tedium verging on disgust did not go away with practice.” A few years later, he turned up as a speechwriter for Margaret Thatcher, as well as her chief policy adviser. As he chronicles life at 10 Downing Street, his ironic sensibility is the chief source of pleasure. His descriptions of Thatcher, especially her inability to read social cues, mingle with his admiration for her leadership and ideological zeal. There are shelves of gossipy books by aides; Mount’s wry retelling of his stint in the inner sanctum is my favorite.