And for a more focused trip, the museum's Web site provides downloadable "Family Adventure" self-guided tours that cover anything from scavenger hunts through the museum to biodiversity and conservation.

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"A lot of outer space hoaxes are really just exercises in wish fulfillment, " says self-proclaimed "hoaxpert" Alex Boese, author of the wide-ranging Museum of Hoaxes: A History of Outrageous Pranks and Deceptions.

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Where, except New York, would a curator put a metro station in a museum of modern art, and what restaurant could be more self-consciously Parisian than Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles in Manhattan?

ECONOMIST: Paris