A conversation with a child goes one of two ways: You are either becoming mind-numbingly bored, or you are having a spiritual awakening. There is no in between. Kids don't just say the darnedest things — they say things that make us question our place in the vast and unknowable universe (too long of a title for a TV show). A friend recently recounted to me how her 3-year-old son, while looking at an old photograph of his father as a child, mused aloud: "When you were little, you were a boy. And now you don't need it anymore, so you gave it to me." Emily Dickinson, eat your heart out! Another friend's 4-year-old babysitting charge made an observation about the book she was reading, announcing that it ended not with a happily-ever-after but with "the family moving to the rental house where they die." Was this nonsense? Or was it a metaphor for the anticlimax of growing old? Or, more insightfully still, a caveat to the post-boomer generations that they could never afford to own a home? Yesterday in The New York Times for Kids, a monthly section in the Sunday paper, The Times published a crossword puzzle constructed by young siblings, ages 8 and 10, allegedly without any help from grown-ups beyond brainstorming. Cool, cool — my greatest talent as an 8-year-old was going two full weeks without showering (not as impressive to my summer camp counselors as it was to me). When interviewed by Christina Iverson, a puzzle editor for The Times, the constructors, Kaela Curry (8) and Nate Curry (10), seemed unfazed by the scale of what they'd achieved. "Our mom and dad were doing it, so I wanted to do it, too," Kate said. Nate chimed in: "Same. And I like solving puzzles." And that was that. The idiosyncratic brilliance of a young person's imagination is, in my opinion, its ability to hold two truths at once. With one foot, these children live in a private world of make-believe, but with the other foot, they're on the outside watching themselves invent it. Kids can describe their dolls' emotions while insisting that dolls aren't real. They can sympathize with a pancake shortly before eating it. I was once babysitting a 5-year-old girl who liked playing dress-up, and she came over and stretched out her unpierced earlobe. "Do you like my earrings?" she asked. Indulging her, I replied, "I love your invisible earrings" — to which she replied, exasperated: "They're not invisible! I'm pretending I have earrings on." That was 10 years ago, and I have yet to reach that level of cosmic understanding. As adults, we get cynical, and we try to justify artifice with logic: You don't pass down boyhood! A pancake can't be lonely and afraid! What isn't there must be invisible! We don't dare admit we're pretending.
Bonus Puzzle: Cryptogram 🖋️A cryptogram, such as the one below, contains a hidden message. Each letter of the alphabet has been substituted with another. The substitutions are the same everywhere in the puzzle. For example, A will always be B, and B will always be C. See the answer in the P.S.
Brain Tickler 🤔Where on the list does Colorado go? See the answer in the P.S.
Puzzle of the WeekEach week we highlight a special puzzle that we published recently. This week, check out Jacob Reed's puzzle from Sunday, April 27. It features picture clues!
How are we doing? Thanks for playing! Subscribe to New York Times Games. If you like this newsletter, you can tell your friends to sign up here. P.S. The answer to the Cryptogram is: Unfortunately we can't watch the origami championship on free television. It's only on paper view. The answer to the Brain Tickler is second in the list. The items are ordered by the number of sides of the polygon they resemble (triangle, rectangle, pentagon, hexagon, heptagon).
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