Aww struck

What's the most interesting question a child has asked you? A new book features over 150 of the best, crowdsourced from around the world. The queries are endearing. But they are a reminder that children are tiny empiricists too; some of nature's smartest survivors

- Sukanya Datta

t's been an incredible four years of crowdsourced responses, since the poet and author Sarah Manguso first posted her query on X: "What's the best question a child has ever asked you?

She was stuck at home in LA at the time, homeschooling her then-eight-year-old son, Sam, amid the pandemic, while going through a divorce, and working on a novel about domestic abuse.

"I really needed a side project that was simple and fun," she says.

While wondering what that could be, she came upon a list she had made years earlier, of strange questions Sam had asked her, between the ages of three and five.

"They were cute, like anything a child does. But they were also cute by the word's original definition, from the word acute: swift and piercing, they cut to the quick," says Manguso, 51.

It struck her that other parents likely had such lists too, and so she posted her question.

The responses that poured in were quirky, funny, endearing, and surprisingly probing.

There were questions about why we have a neck, where animals come from, and about parents' lives before they became parents ("Was mom a baby once, too? Did I play with her?"). Some were eternal puzzles, the answers to which we all wish we knew ("What is a country?"; "How do you know when it's time to leave a party?")

Reading through them, Manguso realised she had found her next project.