Today, everything feels risky and like it’s getting riskier – from incipient AGI to climate tipping points to rising authoritarianism to mass antibiotic resistance. In certain fields such as insurance, mathematics, and healthcare, risk is quantifiable – something you can build markets around and base premiums on. Yet other forms of risk are less easy to define. In such uncertain times, we present the Risk issue, and to start off, we ask artists, writers, creatives and children:

What’s the riskiest thing you’ve ever done?

Photography by Sohrab Golsorkhi-Ainslie

Styling by Eve Bailey

Pien wears a jumpsuit and earrings by Alaïa and a hat by Stephen Jones Millinery.

Pien wears a dress and shoes by Ferragamo and the stylist’s own tights and gloves.

In a “risk society”, I aim to live a risk-free life, now more than ever. I suppose that’s risky in its own way, i.e., foolhardy. 

Hal Foster, art critic

Until two years ago, the riskiest thing I had ever done was publish a book. Once you publish a book, you can’t take it back. Other people are going to be able to read it for the rest of your life. But then, two years ago, I went skiing on a mountain in Italy and accidentally went down a black diamond trail. I don’t know how to ski very well. Once I started down the trail, I couldn’t take it back and I had to finish. That ski run was the scariest half hour of my life. On the other hand, nobody was filming me, so the black diamond is still less risky than publishing a book. Nobody knows what that ski run was like but me.

Elvia Wilk, writer 

I’ve faced rioting police, rafted wild rivers, traversed high-altitude passes, got on a stallion I shouldn’t have, left my last job decades ago and managed to get by as a freelancer ever since, told a man or two I loved him without knowing what the answer might be. The absolutely riskiest thing I ever did, however, was move to Paris on my own at age 17. But like getting on that stallion, I did it in part because I didn’t understand the risks; at 17 I didn’t realise how young and inexperienced I was, how many predators were out there, how many practical things I’d have to navigate, how much my parents would take my departure from suburban California as an occasion to let me know I was really on my own. And also, it was absolutely worth it and then some; it was then that my real life began. I was profoundly poor; I lived in a tiny maid’s room in a grand building in the centre of the city, or rather I slept and ate and read voraciously there. I lived everywhere, roaming restlessly, exhilarated to have at last arrived in a place where I could drink in the sense of deep time I’d craved, and glory in the freedom of being a stranger without people around me to tell me who I could and could not be.

Rebecca Solnit, writer and activist

The riskiest thing I’ve ever done was standing on the ice on the pond of Nannon and Grandpa.

Eskil, age 7

The easy answer, which might make me seem cool and reckless to some, would be entering North Korea without a visa for my return to China. But this worked out so smoothly that I have trouble believing it involved any real danger, and I’m loath to “farm aura” dishonestly from a stigma sponsored by the US Department of State. In terms of the probability of negative consequences relative to their severity, the answer might be the bet Dimitri and I placed on a very poorly-favoured horse named Mugger Hugger at Aqueduct Racetrack circa 2010. This was actually a far bigger risk than I appreciated at the time, as I wasn’t Muslim yet. Reader, true felicity lies not with books of odds but with “the book wherein is no doubt” (Koran 2:2), whose bookmaker is the creator and sustainer of all worlds.

Khalid bin Ya’qub, co-host of the podcast Subliminal Jihad

In Lancaster, Pennsylvania, I tried to secretly film an Amish carpenter, who was powering 3D printers off propane gas, to make his own handheld torch drill battery adaptors.

Maria Lisogorskaya, architect

I was tempted to offer a more superficially risky anecdote – the time when I drove home on two tabs of acid, the time in high school when I went to Big Bear with a known paedophile – but by far, the riskiest thing I’ve ever done has been to date a nice boy from Colorado. Making dinner with Chris, choosing linens with Chris, falling asleep on the sofa with Chris, is far riskier than anything I’ve ever done because, and please excuse the sentimentality, I am falling in love. The more time we spend together, the less control I have – did I have any to begin with? – over my heart and the pain I’d feel in losing him. Real risk offers real reward, and I couldn’t be happier than when I’m on the sofa with Chris, scared shitless.

Madeline Cash, writer

The official style of art in academia when I was in school was what I now call the ass-end of Conceptualism, which dominated the Los Angeles art scene and lingers there to this day. During the 1960s, third-generation Abstract Expressionists took over the faculties of American art schools. In subsequent decades, the students who rebelled against those teachers became teachers themselves and imposed third-generation conceptual art upon their students, including me. In the critique classes of that time, descriptions of artworks and arguments for and against them acquired such importance that they eclipsed the works themselves. Critiques degenerated into pious groupthink in the guise of high seriousness, usually with the implicit goal of dismissing painting as decoration pandering to the art market. As a result, something akin to Catholic guilt prevented many of my contemporaries from putting brush to canvas. I, too, suffered from this inhibition until decades later, when the Covid-19 lockdown made filmmaking impossible for me, and drastic measures became necessary. I decided to fling myself into the void, taking up a medium I was not trained to practise and abandoning the teaching profession. I risked my reputation and livelihood, such as they were, to become a painter.

William E. Jones, artist

All of Pien’s clothes and accessories are by Chanel.

Pien wears a top and skirt by Issey Miyake, shoes by Alaïa and the stylist’s own tights.

On my school Duke of Edinburgh expedition, my group had no other option but to trek through a field full of agitated cows and calves.

Millie, age 14

In the World-War-themed board game Risk, the riskiest thing you can do – aside from trying to hold the Eurasian steppe at all times – is make “alliances”. Whispered proposals to your fellow players that you go for some entente in order to carry out your secret mission are part of the malevolent fun of the game, but they have no legal sanction. There’s no reason to trust your “partner” as you decide to carve up Ukraine together – but it can be, in the parlance of International Relations realism, “necessary”. I have few particularly happy memories of the 2000s, but among them are all-night games of Risk, fuelled by red wine and sausage and mash, in a shared house in Deptford; time would disappear, as we cackled away prosecuting World War Three together. Risk was invented in 1957, at the height of the Cold War, by Albert Lamorisse, the French director of children’s fantasy films. It can be seen as a domestication, for children, of our imminent collective extermination – what if we all got to be Dr Strangelove? It turns out we would really rather enjoy it. I will always love Risk, but perhaps not so much as I did when I thought World War Three was less plausible.

Owen Hatherley, writer

I have Complex PTSD, so I’m always doing risky things. I grew up adjacent to a crime syndicate (the Kray Twins; at age ten, I met one of their assassins). That was risky, but it wasn’t my fault. As a result, I’ve run into toxic relationships, drugs and alcohol, and compulsive scholarship: I’ve tried to get every A in existence. In that world I’m like Terminator, but with a school tie.

The riskiest thing I’ve ever done was recognising how wounded I was, and starting to work on it. This is so risky, according to my permanent survival mode. I might have a feeling. I might ask for something. I might stop running, running, running. I might talk about myself in a book. I might write about this for TANK.

It took a surgeon cutting into my bowels five ways at once in a four-hour operation to turn my life around. Therapy had steered me to the point of seeing how messed up I was. But stuff sometimes requires something tactile. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Timothy Morton, philosopher

Having children is a huge risk – physically, emotionally, socially and financially. All three of my own pregnancies were classified as medically high-risk due to underlying health conditions, and I found it hard to detach from the feeling that something could go wrong at any time. Those risks felt insignificant, however, compared to the psychic endangerment that comes with motherhood. It’s impossible to know in advance how well-suited one truly is to being a parent, or how one’s sense of self might slip away with lack of sleep and relentless hormonal bombardment.

As a white middle-class cis woman, I was comparatively well-insulated from the risk of adverse pregnancy outcomes – this risk, like so many others, is unevenly distributed. My children, too, will have inherited my privilege and be somewhat inoculated from certain social dangers. And yet, I continue to wake up in a cold sweat every night, compelled to check that they are breathing and safe in their beds. The plight of parents in prisons, at borders, in poverty and living through genocide should call to parents everywhere; these parents and their children must be central to our struggle for a better world.

Helen Hester, researcher and academic

My friend Mathilde knelt down and I climbed onto her shoulders, one foot at a time. She then unsteadily rose to her full height, and there I was, legs shaking, wondering how I’d get down.

Mabel, age 11

“Insiders don’t criticise other insiders,” Epstein associate Larry Summers once told Yanis Varoufakis. In my little world of left-wing content creation, the riskiest thing I ever did was to start talking about the long prevalence of insincere “ops” achieving outsized celebrity on the US left (Epstein pals Noam Chomsky and Yippie Prankster Paul Krassner being two recent examples). Talking about the ops of the 1960s and 1970s is tolerable enough, but I crossed an invisible line in 2020-21 when I publicly questioned the alternativity of a then-ascendant online milieu that was once known to us X (formerly Twitter) uncs as the Dirtbag Left.

Want to get blacklisted from the left-liberal cloutfarm with one neat trick? Just question the righteousness of the intergenerationally wealthy NYC millennial mafia currently auditioning to be the Joe Rogan of the left, and you’ll be cybernetically downvoted into oblivion by hordes of extremely online parasocialist reply guys for years.

A certain class of people has always owned America, and their Democratic Socialists of America Maoist Caucus failson great-grandchildren fully expect to inherit that ownership. They possess ineffable levels of cultural capital that the average American can scarcely fathom, much less clock, and they’re never more than one or two degrees of separation from the Thielite tech vampires they pretend to roast. Meet the new media, same as the old media, where no weapon forged against neo-Fabian streamer nepo babies shall prosper. Actual risk is stopping the next Chomsky before he tricks people into canonising him – anything less is kayfabe.

Dimitri Poshlost, co-host of the podcast Subliminal Jihad

I lied about someone punching me in the nose at school. I had been practising a dance routine when a friend’s arm hit my nose and gave me a nosebleed. However, elsewhere in the playground, a boy had been punching someone else and the teachers assumed he’d done it to me too. I didn’t speak up and tell the truth until the next day. It was risky as it got someone into trouble when they hadn’t done anything wrong.

Rosa, aged 6

I hitchhiked loads between the ages of 15 to 22, which everyone thinks is very risky. It has been alleged that I shoplift like nobody’s business. I eat things that have fallen on the floor or passed their expiration date or seem a bit raw all the time. In 2021, I nearly got myself killed driving way too distractedly down a ridiculously steep driveway in Vermont and colliding immediately with a massive truck upon exiting. But what is an accurate risk assessment, like, does it actually not exist, despite what insurance companies and professional risk measurers affirm? Why do I want to say dangerous instead, and reserve risky for things one understands in the moment as risk?

Sophie Lewis, writer

I forced him to pull over so I could see the moon.

We had been driving through the desert for hours and the vibe had gone sour again – maybe the moonlight could bleach it. Just off the side of the road the mountains wriggled out for miles, an irresistible pop song of a landscape. I started scrambling up the ridge, trying to ignore his needling voice as he followed reluctantly behind me.

The ridges were surprisingly narrow and steep, the valleys jagged below. As the elevation rose so did the pitch of his voice. He was afraid of heights, incapable of looking up from his feet. I didn’t know. His voice climbed past anger into something animal, literal shrieks, which only ushered me further up. Just let me have this one thing, I thought through gritted teeth, just let me have the moon.

Every step I took up the ridge was a step away from him. He accused me of risking our lives for the view. I wanted just one beautiful thing before we left. Falling to our death felt like a fair trade-off for beauty.

I turned back to the car when he started to cry.

On the road again, we sat in stiff, horrible silence. The seat warmer burned my ass. He opened his mouth, and for a long time no sound came out, just an empty breath that slid from his lips like a door gliding shut.

“Is there nothing,” he said finally, “you’re afraid to lose?” .

Charlie Engman, artist

Pien wears a dress by Simone Rocha, trousers by Roksanda and shoes by Alaïa.

Hair: Maki Tanaka using Leonor Greyl / Make-up: Jinny Kim using CHANEL Denim Collection and No.1 de CHANEL Body Serum-In-Mist / Casting: Tytiah Blake at Unit C / Photography assistant: Francesco Zinno / Styling assistant: Louie Sahota Singh / Model: Pien Laureijssen at The Hive Management