This audio essay by Stephen Cherry is a rather charming bait-and-switch. You may think you're about to get a straightforward visit to the Charles Darwin exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, with accompanying discussion of the exhibit's place in the currently-hot debate over Intelligent Design. Instead, Cherry's visit becomes a nostalgic trip to his own childhood, when he relished visits with his father to the same Manhattan museum. He describes the painted wooden masks and animal-bone fishhooks and dinosaur bones that he remembers peering at as a nine-year-old and which remain in those same glass cases today. He even gets sentimental about the macaroni and cheese lunch he and his father used to eat, and his inability to find the same diner in the neighborhood this time around.

The strength of the piece is Cherry's ability to evoke a sense of wonder at the natural world and the sensuous pleasure of discovery through physical objects, dead and alive: the new Darwin exhibit features live animals, a tortoise and an iguana, like those Darwin saw on the Galapagos Islands. Cherry does something that public radio voices don't do enough: he marvels unabashedly. A good feature for a magazine show.