Winners of the $10k essay prize

Michael Dean announces the results of the Essay Architecture Prize and the release of The Best Internet Essays 2025, a pocket-sized paperback anthology of 13 finalist essays. The project distilled over 900,000 words across 400 submissions, evaluated by 10 judges with independent criteria. Tommy Dixon won the top prize. The anthology features recurring themes of rootedness, loss, wonder, vulnerability, and the power of attention in a distraction-engineered culture.

Dean frames the anthology as the culmination of a year-long arc: writing a textbook on essay composition, analyzing classic essays against his framework, building AI-powered feedback software, and running a tech-forward prize. The result is something deliberately simple — a physical book small enough to fit in a pocket, designed to be read off-screen.

The piece doubles as a manifesto for printed essay anthologies as an underrated genre. Dean argues that commercially they barely exist, but for aspiring writers they are the best kind of book to own: a range of voices and ideas in one cover, reliable enough to deliver a full dose of literature in a single sitting. The vision is to make this annual — curating the best writing online, the kind people bookmark but inevitably forget, and assembling it into a physical object roughly the size of a phone.

RDCO mapping: The anthology model (curate, edit, print) is a reference pattern for Sanity Check compilation projects. Dean’s emphasis on judging quality across subjective lenses — where individual scores diverge but aggregate rankings converge — mirrors how editorial taste can be systematized without losing nuance. The pocket-sized format and direct-to-reader distribution (via Metalabel, 100% royalties to contributors) is worth tracking as an alternative publishing model.