I called the number and asked for Peter Knecht. An assistant in his office answered, and I said to her, “I’m going to USC law school in the fall, and I’d like to meet with Mr. Knecht about the law clerk job that’s open.” Illustration: Erika Meza There’s also something about children’s books that makes them such a safe space.

The ability to ask any question embodies two things: the freedom to go chase the answer, and the ability to challenge authority, to ask, “How come you’re in charge?” It’s interesting to me how that idea carries through to modern science, where deformities and abnormalities – particularly in the natural world in terms of biological growth – often provide clues to the way things happen normally. Strange things that happen in the brain, for instance, give us important information about how the normal brain functions. The story centres around 1559, with the publication of the Italian philosopher Giambattista Della Porta’s book Natural Magic. There was a whole vernacular style of “books of secrets” that were being released at that time, extremely strange compendia of information which linked into older, magical ideas. Della Porta’s volume was a classy version of these popular booklets. But behind it there was a philosophy of natural magic, that by then had matured into the concept of nature as a network of hidden or occult forces governing everything that happened. The aim of a natural philosopher like Della Porta was to be able to understand these forces and manipulate them, bringing about things that wouldn’t occur in the normal course of nature.I would recommend this book to parents or educators who would like to refresh some common sense reflections on why we work daily to create an environment of inquiry, and how we can keep it alive as adults as well. Curiosity can be trained, and nurtured, or stifled, depending on how much we work on it and feed it. We can argue that curiosity is a trait which leads to a richer, more fulfilling life, but nevertheless, different strokes for different folks; some people are intellectuals, some are brawn, some leaders, some artists- people have innately different approaches to fulfillment and there's a myriad of ways that individuals are inspired to function and serve in society. Not everyone is going to have curiosity at the center of their lives, though we wish they all could share in the fun. So that is where Rosicrucianism came from, and in this book Francis Yates argues that the early enlightenment – the emergence of science in the 16th century – drew on part of that tradition. It’s widely agreed that Francis Yates pushed this idea too far, into realms that can no longer be upheld. Nevertheless, the idea that there was some kind of link between the development of science and the emergence of secret brotherhoods in the early 17th century has to be taken seriously. You see this motif of secret brotherhoods appear again and again among the writers of that time who then went on to be influential in the history of science, particularly Francis Bacon. I think it’s because no matter what happens - and some are really quite hard-hitting - they end with a note of hope. Ultimately, a book wraps its arms around you and says, “it will all be okay”. Funny, big-hearted books do this x 1 ZILLION. When I’ve been overwhelmed, I’ve curled up with my two little people and a funny book at story-time and it’s been just the thing I needed. Rob Biddulph is always a winner for us and so is this new one - This Book has Alpacas (and Bears) by Emma Perry and Rikin Parekh. I hope T-Rex will do that for someone somewhere too. Sparking curiosity The results have always been surprising, and the connections I’ve made from the curiosity conversations have cascaded through my life—and the movies we make—in the most unexpected ways. My conversation with the astronaut Jim Lovell certainly started me on the path to telling the story of Apollo 13. But how do we convey, in a movie, the psychology of being trapped on a crippled spaceship? It was Veronica de Negri, a Chilean activist who was tortured for months by her own government, who taught me what it’s like to be forced to rely completely on oneself to survive. Veronica de Negri helped us to get Apollo 13 right as surely as Jim Lovell did.

This inquisitiveness seems as intrinsic to us as hunger or thirst. A child asks a series of seemingly innocent questions: Why is the sky blue? How high up does the blue go? Where does the blue go at night? Instead of answers (most adults can’t explain why the sky is blue, including me), the child might receive a dismissive, slightly patronizing reply like, “Why, aren’t you the curious little girl . . .” 7

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So-called progressive educational approaches (‘learning skills approaches’) are misguided. Traditional teacher-guided, fact-oriented learning - if well implemented - is more effective in putting in place a foundation for epistemic curiosity. “Anyone who stops learning facts for himself because he can Google them later on is literally making himself stupid”. Furthermore, progressive education ideas present themselves as anti-hierarchical, but in practice tend to entrench social hierarchies.

I think it’s that impulse to follow our own desire to get to the bottom of things that has allowed modern science to emerge. And it’s those sorts of questions that still motivate a great deal of modern science today. The questions being probed at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN seem very esoteric, but they are ultimately questions about big things such as what the fundamental relationships are between the forces and the particles that make up the world, and whether there are extra dimensions to the universe.

Thorndike himself is quite intolerant of these magicians, and sees what they were saying as crazy and completely unsupportable. But nevertheless this was an early effort to try to be sympathetic to what in previous times had just seemed like pure superstition – the idea that there were magical forces. The parable could not be blunter: curiosity causes suffering. Indeed, the story’s moral is aimed directly at the audience: whatever your current misery, reader, it was caused by Adam, Eve, the serpent, and their rebellious curiosity. The transformative power of attention to bring life to seemingly mundane things gave me more than a pause, it opened a sense of possibility into discovering the enigma of ennui, while uncovering the novelty inherent in normal. Staying curious allows us to never be bored again.

Something else happened during that year of being a legal clerk that was just as important. It was the year I started to actively appreciate the real power of curiosity. Children’s books are an absolute gift for curious minds. They stretch across everything from nature and the stars to extraordinary people and movements in history, all kinds of life skills, and…look, I’m never going to be able to write an exhaustible list! You can find a book on every topic under the sun (especially if you have a LIBRARIAN to help you find it - there’s a reason why I dedicated this book to librarians). And if there’s something that hasn’t been written yet, you could bet your last biscuit there’s a writer out there working on it. The range of books is something I was always amazed by as a child stepping into a library. I still feel that way today when I think about what’s out there. Here’s the remarkable thing. Curiosity isn’t just a great tool for improving your own life and happiness, your ability to win a great job or a great spouse. It is the key to the things we say we value most in the modern world: independence, self-determination, self-government, self-improvement. Curiosity is the path to freedom itself.

The girl is left not just without answers, but also with the strong impression that asking questions—innocuous or intriguing questions—can often be regarded as impertinent. The child who feels free to ask why the sky is blue grows into the adult who asks more disruptive questions: Why am I the serf and you the king? Does the sun really revolve around Earth? Why are people with dark skin slaves and people with light skin their masters? types: diversive, epistemic and emphatic curiosity; epistemic main focus in the book, typically what Leonardo da Vinci did. The second part of the book rehashes that material in ‘seven ways to stay curious’. The idea is to provide practical guidelines to develop and maintain a spirit of curiosity. Leslie seems to veer a bit from his initial position of relentless advocacy for epistemic curiosity in that he aims for a balance between the diverse and epistemic, hence for a cognitive investment in detail and the big picture, in the mundane and the abstract, in theory and practice.