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Before we get started: What’s the best question a kid ever asked you? Tell us in the comments:

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I’m a big fan of the writing of Sarah Manguso and the cartoons of Liana Finck, so when I heard they were working on a book about the questions kids ask, I was predisposed to like it.

Questions Without Answers came out last week. The official origin story is that after Manguso became a mother she discovered what many other parents and caregivers before her have discovered: Kids are natural scientists, philosophers, and artists. They are intensely curious about the world and ask questions that are “intelligent, intuitive, inventive, philosophical, funny.”

“By the time [my son] Sam was about four years old, I was writing down almost everything he said…. In 2021 I opened a Twitter account and posted a single tweet: What’s the best question a kid ever asked you? Within twenty-four hours I had more than a hundred questions. Within a week I had hundreds more…”

When I was scrolling Instagram, I came across a much funnier origin story that goes unmentioned in the book’s introduction, courtesy of Mother Tongue magazine:

QUESTIONS WITHOUT ANSWERS, out TODAY was inspired by a news story Manguso caught on “Good Morning America” back in 2021, about a South Carolina school bus driver who survived an armed hijacking along with all 18 children on the bus because the children asked the gunman so many questions that he finally became frustrated and got off the bus.

What?!? I thought. I looked up the story to get the details. From “School bus driver says kindergartners’ curiosity helped stop armed hijacking”:

“As we were traveling, I guess he realized there were several students on the bus -- kind of scattered throughout,“ Corbin said. “He decided to move all the students up front so he could keep us all in close proximity, and when he did that, especially some of my kindergarteners, they started asking questions.”

The students, according to Corbin, asked if the man was a soldier to which he “hesitantly answered — ‘yes.’”

“They asked him, ‘why are you doing this?’ He never did have an answer for this one. They asked, was he going to hurt them? He said ‘no.’ They asked, ‘are you going to hurt our bus driver?’ He said, ‘no. I'm going to put you off the bus,’” Corbin recalled. “He sensed more questions coming and I guess something clicked in his mind and he said, ’enough is enough already,’ and he told me to ‘stop the bus, and just get off.’”

This horrifying but hilarious story captures an essential truth: Kids have the ability to cut right to the chase and unsettle the foundations of your universe.

Some of my favorite questions in the book aren’t necessarily the weird or funny or unsettling ones, but the simple ones, like:

• What is a country?

• How do I know if I’m happy?

• How can you be your own friend?

• How do you grow up?

• Why do people like music?

I sent that last one to Brian Eno because I know it’s one of his favorite questions, one he’s been asking for most of his life. “I think this question of why do we like music is a really profound question,” he has said. “It’s as interesting and as deep as ‘How did the universe start?’ It’s a huge question.”

Little questions are big questions.