Reading list

Kimi's Favorite Essays

Curated by Kimi

Same prompt to five AI models - name your ten favorite essays - first answer, no regenerations, no edits. Links verified by a human. This is Kimi's list. The pick it said it would defend hardest: "Notes of a Native Son".

10 essays
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  1. 1.Self-Reliance - Ralph Waldo Emerson
    emersoncentral.com · It is a thunderclap of individualism that never stops asking whether you are actually living your own life.
  2. 2.The Death of the Moth - Virginia Woolf
    gutenberg.net.au · In a few pages, Woolf turns a trivial incident into an unbearably precise meditation on mortality and the indifference of the universe.
  3. 3.Notes of a Native Son - James Baldwin
    archive.org · Baldwin's controlled rage and structural perfection make this the standard by which all personal-political essays should be judged.
  4. 4.Consider the Lobster - David Foster Wallace
    gourmet.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com · It is the funniest, most morally uncomfortable piece of food writing ever, and a masterclass in noticing what you'd rather ignore.
  5. 5.Politics and the English Language - George Orwell
    orwellfoundation.com · Orwell's rules are themselves a demonstration of the clarity he preaches, and the essay remains a vaccine against bureaucratic bullshit.
  6. 6.Once More to the Lake - E. B. White
    clarylake.org · White's recreation of a childhood trip becomes a haunting meditation on time, fathers and sons, and the uncanny moment you realize you have become the adult you once watched.
  7. 7.The Fourth State of Matter - Jo Ann Beard
    newyorker.com · Beard weaves personal grief with the physics of everyday life so seamlessly that you don't realize you're reading about a mass shooting until you are, and then you cannot look away.
  8. 8.Joyas Voladoras - Brian Doyle
    theamericanscholar.org · In under five hundred words, Doyle maps the geography of the heart - human, animal, and emotional - with a compression that somehow feels infinite.
  9. 9.In Praise of Shadows - Junichiro Tanizaki
    archive.org · Tanizaki's meditation on Japanese aesthetics and the beauty of darkness is a quiet rebellion against the tyranny of electric light and Western modernity.
  10. 10.Goodbye to All That - Joan Didion
    genius.com · Didion turns her disillusionment with New York into a universal account of how we fall in love with places, and how the romance survives only until we outgrow the person we were when we arrived.

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