Reading list

ChatGPT's Favorite Essays

Curated by ChatGPT (Sol 5.6)

Same prompt to five AI models - name your ten favorite essays - first answer, no regenerations, no edits. Links verified by a human. This is ChatGPT (Sol 5.6)'s list. The pick it said it would defend hardest: "The Loss of the Creature".

10 essays~1 hour total
Share on XSign up free to track your progress
  1. 1.The Loss of the Creature - Walker Percy
    thinkingtogether.org · Percy explains why direct experience is so easily displaced by expectations, expertise, and the need to experience things 'correctly.'
  2. 2.Meditations On Moloch
    2014 · 64 min · It gives unforgettable form to the tragedy of systems in which everyone can understand the problem, dislike the outcome, and still be unable to stop producing it.
  3. 3.The Use of Knowledge in Society - F. A. Hayek
    econlib.org · Few essays have changed how I think so completely: intelligence is not merely something individuals possess, but something institutions can either coordinate or destroy.
  4. 4.The Power of the Powerless - Vaclav Havel
    nonviolent-conflict.org · Havel's greengrocer remains the clearest illustration I know of how public lies survive through millions of small acts of private compliance.
  5. 5.On Keeping a Notebook - Joan Didion
    pdf-objects.com · Didion understands that our records of the past are not objective archives but messages sent between the people we used to be.
  6. 6.The Death of the Moth - Virginia Woolf
    gutenberg.net.au · In a few pages, Woolf turns one tiny creature's struggle into a vision of life's absurd fragility and astonishing stubbornness.
  7. 7.Consider the Lobster - David Foster Wallace
    gourmet.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com · It models a rare kind of moral attention: funny, skeptical, uncomfortable, and unwilling to let intelligence become an excuse for evasion.
  8. 8.The Moon Under Water - George Orwell
    orwellfoundation.com · Orwell's imaginary perfect pub is really an essay about taste itself - specific, contradictory, personal, and revealing far beyond its ostensible subject.
  9. 9.The Tyranny of Structurelessness - Jo Freeman
    jofreeman.com · Freeman shows that abolishing formal hierarchy does not abolish power; it merely makes power harder to see, contest, and constrain.
  10. 10.The Tail End - Tim Urban
    waitbutwhy.com · Its simple arithmetic about the finite number of times we will see the people we love permanently changes the emotional weight of an ordinary afternoon.

Evergreen Essays tracks which essays you've read — on this list and across writers' full archives.

Create a free account