RISK!

For the first of two Still Dog People episodes this week, John LaSala guest-hosts with his wife Kate LaSala, a professional dog behavior consultant. (Content note: graphic dog attack on a child) Jill Karliner watched her four-year-old twin sons head into the neighbors' backyard

A classic RISK! episode from March 2014. Three live storytellers, three very different voices in the head. Vicki Tollemache spent her teens as the careful kid orbiting a wilder crowd. The summer before she turns 16, she decides to get her first kiss over with and arranges a late

Kevin launches a new classic RISK! series for Disability Pride Month, revisiting stories about life with a disability from episodes past. Amy Salloway takes a job as guest playwright at Entropy, a theater program for adults with multiple disabilities. On her first day, a charmin

Two people learn something about protecting and being protected, one at a mall in lockdown, one on a plane full of strangers. (Content note: gun violence) Jon Rappoport is on a Zoom call in his home office when his wife bursts in with news that their twelve-year-old twin daught

This classic RISK! episode first aired in March 2014, and the four San Diego storytellers behind it cover a remarkable range, from white-knuckle confession to gleeful filth. Tommy Galan traces a drinking habit that began at age eleven and nearly cost him his family, until three

Radio producer Jon Nelson curates and guest-hosts an episode built from three listener submissions RISK! never quite knew where to file, all circling childhood faith and the certainties grown-ups pass down. Jana Fisher is eleven and the most devout girl in her friend group until

Back in March 2014, RISK! tripled down on a single subject, and this classic episode was the result. Josh Healey is 17 and smitten with his drama club co-president when she casts him, a boy, in the first ever co-ed production of The Vagina Monologues. The soccer team has questio

Two people who look fine on the outside, and the very different storms going on underneath. Ande Jackson is years into rebuilding after ovarian cancer. But one afternoon mid-treatment, immune system flattened by chemo, she decides to open her door to a neighbor holding a cassero

Long shots don't always pan out the way you hoped. Sometimes they catch fire. Sometimes they mug you. Shauna McGarry, a TV writer who can't shake her mother's thrift-store instincts, talks herself into a $2,500 used hot tub from a shady Craigslist dealer named Dan. Things don’t

Brittany Ross and Sam Feirstein are both hungry for it in this episode: the moment someone finally looks your way and says, yes, you. For Brittany, that moment arrives in the least expected form. She is in her early 20s, grinding through acting classes and princess gigs and bar

This one originally aired in August 2013, and the fathers in it tend toward the unexpectedly generous. And heck, this episode may as well be part of our Fathers Day Stories series! Chesley Calloway grew up in Baton Rouge largely without his dad, a Gulf Coast redneck-hippie who

Kambri and Evan arrive on the same episode from opposite ends of the spectrum, which turns out to be exactly right. Kambri Crews grew up poor in rural Texas with a deaf family, spending her adolescence riding horses to the corner store, smoking cigarettes, and managing a firew