Heart Essays

The handsome Texas sailor who offers dinner to a runaway in Central Park. The Midwestern college girl who stops a cop in Times Square for restaurant advice. The Brooklyn man on a midnight subway who helps a weary tourist find her way to Chinatown. The Columbia University graduate student who encounters an unexpected object of beauty at the Metropolitan Museum of Art....

This essay comes from the NPR series This I Believe, which features brief personal reflections from both famous and unknown Americans. The pieces that make up the series compel listeners to rethink not only what and how they have arrived at their beliefs, but also the extent to which they share them with others.

A remarkable insight into the birth of a writer and the moving discovery of family secrets. When Hanif Kureishi discovers an abandoned manuscript of his father's, his understanding of the family history is transformed. So begins a journey which takes Kureishi through his father's privileged childhood by the sea in Bombay, to the trauma of partition and to his adult life hidden away in the suburbs of Bromley - his days spent as a minor functionary in the Pakistan embassy in London, his nights writing prose, hopeful of one day receiving literary recognition.

Eager for a "doable adventure", Christopher Koch sets off on an impromptu 1,500-mile motorcycle trip down the Mississippi River from St. Paul to New Orleans in November 2014 - ill-equipped and underprepared as an unexpected Arctic air mass, the death rattle of a Pacific super-typhoon, washes over the American heartland. While meteorologists struggle for superlatives to describe the record-breaking cold, Koch pushes onward to overcome the weather, mechanical troubles, and his own hubris - and in doing so learns as much about himself as the hardscrabble landscape through which he rides.