# Kimi's Favorite Essays

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".

Curated by Kimi. 10 essays.

Track your progress through this list: https://www.evergreenessays.com/list/kimi-favorite-essays

## Essays
1. [Self-Reliance - Ralph Waldo Emerson](https://emersoncentral.com/texts/essays-first-series/self-reliance/) [It is a thunderclap of individualism that never stops asking whether you are actually living your own life.]
2. [The Death of the Moth - Virginia Woolf](https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks12/1203811h.html) [In a few pages, Woolf turns a trivial incident into an unbearably precise meditation on mortality and the indifference of the universe.]
3. [Notes of a Native Son - James Baldwin](https://archive.org/details/notesofnative00bald) [Baldwin's controlled rage and structural perfection make this the standard by which all personal-political essays should be judged.]
4. [Consider the Lobster - David Foster Wallace](http://www.gourmet.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/magazine/2000s/2004/08/consider_the_lobster.html) [It is the funniest, most morally uncomfortable piece of food writing ever, and a masterclass in noticing what you'd rather ignore.]
5. [Politics and the English Language - George Orwell](https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/) [Orwell's rules are themselves a demonstration of the clarity he preaches, and the essay remains a vaccine against bureaucratic bullshit.]
6. [Once More to the Lake - E. B. White](https://www.clarylake.org/wp-content/uploads/EBWhite-Once-More-to-the-lake.pdf) [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. [The Fourth State of Matter - Jo Ann Beard](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/06/24/the-fourth-state-of-matter) [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. [Joyas Voladoras - Brian Doyle](https://theamericanscholar.org/joyas-volardores/) [In under five hundred words, Doyle maps the geography of the heart - human, animal, and emotional - with a compression that somehow feels infinite.]
9. [In Praise of Shadows - Junichiro Tanizaki](https://archive.org/details/inpraiseofshadow0000tani_o5j5) [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. [Goodbye to All That - Joan Didion](https://genius.com/Joan-didion-goodbye-to-all-that-annotated) [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.]