Emma Waters was first introduced to readers of The New York Times in an April 2025 report titled “Trump’s White House assesses ways to persuade women to have more children.” The piece’s hero image is Waters, sitting on a couch with what appears to be a toddler while, blurred in the foreground, a pair of baby feet dangle into the frame. There is no getting around the fact that she looks incredibly smug. Perhaps any of us would be too if we were being funded and groomed as the next big policy star by the right-wing think tank behind Project 2025.

More than a year later, Waters is the subject of her very own New York Times profile. Mrs. Waters (she’s emphatic that the outlet identify her with this title; it normally goes with a default Ms.) has a lot of confident prescriptions for raising the birth rate without the use of assisted reproductive technology like in vitro fertilization. But when the piece was published, Waters was offended that its writer zeroed in on her domestic aptitude: “The profile made sure to note my homemade raw milk butter — a ‘MAHA elixir,’ as they called it — alongside our sourdough, Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons,’ and my request to be called ‘Mrs. Waters,’ Mrs. Waters wrote in a peevish Daily Wire editorial. “My actual work promoting root-cause care for infertility received less airtime.” 

It’s infuriating when a woman’s accomplishments outside the home are overlooked in favor of her homemaking bona fides. But what if that woman’s work, the work she believes was overlooked by The New York Times, is telling women like her that they should not work outside the home? Well, that is a conundrum that Mrs. Waters, in the interest of avoiding confrontation with her life’s cognitive dissonance, should probably learn to live with.

Waters’ new book, “Lead Like Jael: 7 Timeless Principles for Today’s Women of Faith,” published last March, is not the kind of book that The New York Times considers serious: self-helpish, sentimental, and authored by someone whose policy prescriptions are backed by very little real-world experience. But The Heritage Foundation is investing in Waters, offering a platform for her book, a new podcast, a salary on which to support her husband (currently in his last year of seminary school) and 2 — soon to be 3 — young daughters. 

Being anointed the new standard bearer for young woman conservatives might have been a really great gig 5 or 10 years ago, before young women conservatives realized that they are convenient smoke screens for a Republican agenda that no longer bothers to hide its anti-woman agenda. Before antifeminist tradwives and grandstanding edgelords alike began publicly sharing stories of what happened when they signed on as handmaidens for a regressive, misogynist worldview and then realized, little by little and then all at once, that they weren’t exempt from the regressive misogyny.

Canadian YouTuber Lauren Southern, for instance, was an early adopter of pick-me conservatism whose first video, posted when she was 19, was titled “Why I’m not a feminist.” Southern identified with the irreverent shock tactics that originated in online gaming before taking shape as a culture-war agenda; after her videos began spreading like norovirus, she was hired by Tenet Media, which was later revealed to be a Russian influence operation. 

Southern’s second act was tradwife. “I figured if I just follow the manual of look pretty, wear the right dress, quit my job, have babies, serve my husband, then I will be able to have this happy family life that so many people crave,” she told “On Point” host Meghna Chakrabarti in early 2026, when her memoir, “This is Not Real Life,” was published. Southern was one of the first high-profile women to try and square the circle of being both a godly wife and helpmeet, and the internet’s loudmouthed, outrageous Nazi queen. Her book is disarmingly honest — if not exactly remorseful — about the bleak results, which included drug addiction, mental-health breaks, and an alleged sexual assault involving Andrew Tate. 

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Then there’s former influencer Alice Llani, who started her channel, Alice and Fern, as a peek into the life of an earthy-crunchy, freebirthing, shoe-shunning tradwife. Via TikTok, Llani disseminated conspiracy-coded proto-MAHA fearmongering about sunscreen and vaccines; she shamed women who didn’t or couldn’t breastfeed; she proclaimed that no mother should take their children for pediatrician visits because pediatricians are all pedophiles. Married at 19, Llani was, by age 25, divorced from her controlling and allegedly abusive husband. She also had full custody of her baby and toddler and limited job prospects. “If any woman is considering being a tradwife and dedicating herself to a man,” she told Newsweek in 2024, “I would beg her not to and tell her she is worthy of achieving her own dreams and goals.” 

And there’s 27-year-old Ashley St. Clair, the former Turning Point USA brand ambassador and Elon Musk baby mama, who appeared on Fox News to fret about the declining birth rate and wrote a children’s book, “Elephants Are Not Birds,” with a clear anti-trans message. Since leaving MAGA, St. Clair has admitted on social media that she regrets her previous demonizing of the trans community and that Musk has slashed child-support payments, happily let his fanboys on X create deepfake porn images of her, and has little apparent interest in being a presence in his youngest child’s life. 

In many cases, these women aligned themselves with conservatism because they reveled in being loudly and proudly politically incorrect. “I was in love with the frisson of transgression,” said Anna, one of the disillusioned former believers profiled in Sam Adler-Bell’s March 2026 investigation “The women leaving the new right.” Anna’s thirst to luxuriate in racism, bigotry and woman hating meant supporting the flaccid alpha cope of JD Vance and Tucker Carlson who never missed a chance to paint women as crazy cat ladies who, by suffocating their true feminine nature, made themselves miserable; she told Adler-Bell that she believed she would be grandfathered into this thrillingly transgressive movement in exchange for a chunk of her dignity and self-respect. Instead she found herself biting her tongue around male peers with open contempt for women, existing conditionally in a space where sexism was no longer dressed up in the language of chivalry, protection and life-giving. 

Former podcaster Alex Kaschuta, who hosted a wealth of reactionary thought leaders on her show “Subversive,” told Adler-Bell that she saw her role as dispensing “this insider perspective on the dark side of female nature from . . . the rare self-aware member of the female sex.” It took the grave mistake of objecting to rank misogyny from her peers to confirm that whatever she wrote, whatever her accomplishments, whatever high-profile New Right icons she platformed on “Subversive” were not enough to overcome being a woman in a movement that believes women are property who must be reminded of their place, lest they forget.

For all these women, it took having terrible, even traumatizing experiences in these movements to make them realize that perhaps it’s not feminist claptrap to believe in equal rights and bodily autonomy. Waters has the confidence — if not the audience — of someone certain that her policy-wonk rigor is insurance against the fate of so many other conservative women thrown under the bus as soon as they became inconvenient.

(Bettmann Archive/Getty Images) Phyllis Schlafly

Waters has taken comparisons to antifeminist activist Phyllis Schlafly as a compliment: After all, Schlafly was brilliant and confident and media savvy too. She was the most prominent antifeminist of her era, yet Schlafly couldn’t outmaneuver her core contradiction: A working mother famous for dissuading other women from working; an ambitious politico who told women that they should strive only to be good wives and mothers. It will be interesting to see what happens when Waters is no longer her family’s de facto breadwinner — when her husband, who is currently in seminary, graduates and assumes his rightful place as head of the family.

And though Waters is one of the Heritage Foundation’s current stars, she is also at odds with the organization’s increasingly radical flank, which includes president Kevin Roberts, chief economist E.J. Antoni, and Senior Research Fellow Scott Yenor, all of whom represent an ideological rift between classical conservatism and wingnut zealotry. In 2025, Roberts defended Tucker Carlson’s chummy interview with pocket Nazi Nick Fuentes and did not expect the pushback he received. Antoni’s nomination to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics was withdrawn in 2025 amid protest from both conservative and liberal economists, a history of sexually demeaning social-media insinuations, and a presence at the January 6 Capitol riots.

And Yenor is a well-known misogynist who has called professional women “medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome,” believes employers need to stop emasculating workplaces with consequences for sexual harassment or gender discrimination, and hopes to help repeal women’s suffrage. The Heritage Foundation’s growing tendency toward mask-off extremism threatens to expose its own fraudulence; the think tank’s “original scam,” wrote Paul Krugman, “was designed for a different era — a Reaganesque era in which plutocrats could discreetly leverage bigotry and intolerance to elect Republicans who then delivered deregulation and tax cuts.” 

That’s not great news for a woman like Waters who hopes, probably sincerely, that men and women can get past differences in the interest of getting that birth rate up. “At the center of every problem, there is a woman with too much power,” wrote Adler-Bell. And the more prominent Waters becomes, the more of a problem she’ll be.

Which is unfortunate, because there are moments in which Waters gets very close to some revelations about when and why women are valued. One of the 7 principles outlined in “Lead Like Jael” is that women seek out the wisdom and counsel of older women on marriage, children, and the Biblical feminine, which bucks the complementarian expectation that husbands guide women’s most important decisions. Elsewhere, she comes tantalizingly close to recognizing the sexism of expecting women alone to bear the brunt of managing reproduction.

Discussing the development of hormonal birth control for men, Waters points out that a study on men receiving regular injections had to be shelved due to the number of men who dropped out after experiencing side effects like acne, moodiness, and weight gain. Her conclusion is a little bizarre: For Waters, the fact that men could not handle the kind of side effects that women regularly experience on hormonal birth control was proof positive that hormonal birth control is inherently bad for women. (Rather than, say, proof of medicine’s prioritizing of men’s physical comfort.)

The platform given to Waters by the Heritage Foundation is prominent, but despite the efforts of The New York Times, her intended audience doesn’t seem to be interested. Or perhaps they’ve simply seen this show before, and already know how it ends. 

Schlafly, were she around today, would probably not be the wise mentor Waters conjures in “Lead Like Jael.” She would not tell Waters that the game she’s playing is rigged, or reveal that a woman can be a bright star in the conservative firmament only with the permission of men. It’s unlikely she’d talk about the cabinet appointment Ronald Reagan dangled in front of her as she worked tirelessly to get him elected, the cabinet appointment she never got. She would believe that Waters has to find out the hard way, just as she did.  

The post The conservative movement’s sporadic anointment of Gen-Z spokeswomen appeared first on Salon.com.

Somewhere in the halcyon years of internet writing, I read — or, at least, I remember reading — a piece titled “Holden Caulfield was the first millennial dipsh*t.” I’m almost positive this piece existed, and the fact that I couldn’t find any mention of it in the sad, hollowed-out husk of the 2026 internet offers no proof that it didn’t. What did turn up are a newer generation’s takes on Holden, many of them unexpectedly harsh: He’s “the most insufferable character ever written,” “an entitled brat,” the “original ‘needs to touch grass’ guy,” a “clueless rich kid who’s never had to try,” a “self-important, spoiled and worthless little sh*t,” and “an emo narcissist with an inflated sense of his own self-worth.” 

Millennials were the first generation to anoint old Holden as “problematic” — a 2009 New York Times piece titled “Get a life, Holden Caulfield,” quoted educators who still taught “The Catcher in the Rye,” a book that turns 75 this year, and was once a standard in the English curriculum for grades 9–11. One educator said that, when she taught at a public charter school, “I had a lot of students comment, ‘I can’t really feel bad for this rich kid with a weekend free in New York City.’” A teacher who taught the book over 3 decades noted that “Holden’s passivity is especially galling and perplexing to many present-day students . . . “[T]hey do not have much sympathy for alienated antiheroes.” And one recalled a boy telling her, “We just wanted to tell him, ‘Shut up and take your Prozac.’”

Reddit threads and Goodreads reviews suggest that Gen Z has similar smoke for Holden, which makes sense when you consider that for these kids, active-shooter drills are as much a part of grade school as multiplication tables, and creepy full-grown adults are sliding into their DMs asking for nudes. You can’t really blame them if their response to the self-absorbed internal monologues of an unreliable narrator is, Oh, boo hoo. Get some real problems. 

But they’ve got another bone to pick with Holden Caulfield: He is being used as a prop by performative men to impress those around him. “Among Gen Z, books have become a symbol not of intelligence but of ‘hotness,’ an accessory to be worn with a good outfit, wedged in the bottom of a designer bag or pretentious tote,” wrote one young woman in a piece for the Times of London. And she has some pitiless words for the callow young men toting “The Catcher in the Rye” pretentiously around: The book, she writes, “has become a go-to summer read for incel types who overly identify with the petulant protagonist Holden Caulfield . . . [W]henever [my friend] sees a man with J. D. Salinger in hand, she assumes he must still be at school: ‘It screams English literature A-level.’” Another piece, this one written by two Gen-Z women, posits that Holden himself is “the ultimate performative male.” 

This take is ungenerous but not surprising, given that one of the timeworn accusations against Holden Caulfield is hypocrisy: This guy calls everyone else phony, but he’s just as phony! It did make me wonder, though, whether Gen-Z readers who are assigned “The Catcher in the Rye” still get the same decontextualized introduction to the book as I and the rest of Gen X did. I don’t remember how old I was the first time I read the book, but each time I’ve returned to it as an adult, and there have been a few, I reach the end thoroughly baffled. Are students still introduced to “Catcher” as a novel about disaffection and anomie rather than one about grief, trauma and other things that were absolutely not talked about in Salinger’s day and rarely talked about in mine? And if so, why? 

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The idea that the art can be separated from the artist has never made sense to me — and the way it was foregrounded within the cultural discourse of #MeToo too often felt like a disingenuous avoidance of the clear reality that great art has been made by people who cause profound harm to others. “The Catcher in the Rye” is a text that is flatly impossible to decouple from its author: A book about trauma written in the midst of trauma by a traumatized man. This doesn’t mean that anyone reading the book needs to know Salinger’s whole deal, but both its creation (much of it was written during World War II, when Salinger served as a counterintelligence agent and was one of the first G.I.s to see the human toll at Dachau) and its wild commercial success (which repelled the author and led to his withdrawal from public life.)

As Mikki Halpin noted in these virtual pages following his death in 2010 at the age of 91, Salinger’s quasi-hermithood, among other things, gave cover to his relationships with inappropriately young women; his desire for privacy was inflated into mythology by a “literary establishment,” Halpin wrote, whose collective investment “in the fictional, reclusive Salinger . . . is a convenient cudgel with which to silence any discussion of Salinger’s personal life, particularly any revelation of unsavory truths.”

I would add that the Salinger myth also delayed a reckoning with his most famous character’s mental health. Gen Z men are not the first to use “The Catcher in the Rye” as a prop, after all: Years before I read it, I knew it only as the book Mark David Chapman was carrying when he assassinated John Lennon in 1980 and that, in 1981, was left in the hotel room of John Hinckley Jr. shortly before he attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan. (In 1989, it resurfaced in another high-profile shooting when Robert John Bardo murdered actor Rebecca Schaeffer, dropping his copy as he fled her Hollywood home.) There’s been plenty of skepticism about whether the latter two were Chapman copycats rather than murders actually inspired by the book. Either way, reluctance to associate either Salinger or his most indelible creation with crazed murderers meant keeping their own wounds at arms’ length. 

(MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images) “The Catcher in the Rye”

This is, in part, why I’m surprised at Gen Z’s dismissal of Holden Caulfield as a whiny white rich-kid hypocrite. This cohort has come of age having open conversations about mental health that were unthinkable as recently as 4 decades ago; they understand the way formative traumas burrow into the minds and bodies of those affected and eventually grow unmanageable. I can definitely understand why there might not be, let’s say, a surplus of empathy for a privileged young man carelessly and repeatedly squandering his expensive education. But brushing by consequential facts of Holden’s life — parents who treat him as an out-of-sight-out-of-mind problem, the death of his brother, the suicide of his classmate, a history of being molested by older men — to call him performative feels awfully heartless for a generation this conversant with how trauma works. 

Listen, I don’t know anyone who liked Holden Caulfield the first time they read the book, probably because he is not supposed to be particularly likable; Salinger wrote the book for adults, not teens. But reading “The Catcher in the Rye” as an adult, and again as the parent of a Holden-aged boy, has made me realize that if the circumstances in which young readers meet the character have been slow to change, and the lens on him informed largely by a calcified reputation of youth in revolt, that’s on the adults in the room who, like the adults in his life, can’t hear everything he’s telling us.   

The post How Holden Caulfield became a performative male appeared first on Salon.com.

Charlotte was cleaning out her parents’ garage last summer when she found a box of catalogs, circa 1996–1999. dELiA*s, MoxieGirl, Alloy — they were all there. “Instant flashback,” she says, describing how she sat right down on the concrete floor to page through them. Growing up in what she calls “rural suburban” Pennsylvania, Charlotte and her older sister made yearly pilgrimages to the Urban Outfitters flagship store in Philadelphia to spend their summer-job money on baby tees and suede Converse One-Stars. But in between, Charlotte, now 43, says they fought over who got the first look at the mail-order catalogs that, at the time, were the first to cater specifically to a tween and teen-girl audience.

Flipping through them three decades on, she realized what made dELiA*s and its ilk so different from the other mail-order catalogs that materialized every few months in her family’s mail pile like L.L. Bean, J. Crew, Tweeds and Talbot’s. “The whole thing was very Girl Power. [The models] looked their age and made goofy faces or looked like they were shouting. It wasn’t like ‘okay, stand there and look pretty.’” The catalogs delivered a rush, Charlotte said, because “It felt like they were telling a story that regular teen magazines kind of couldn’t.”

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These days, nostalgia for a more analog world keeps growing, even for those who weren’t alive during much of it (one marketing survey found that more than a third of Gen Z is nostalgic for the 1990s) and that might explain the Instagram Reels, Reddit forums, YouTube videos, and Tumblrs that look wistfully or snarkily or earnestly back to a decade when everything was so much slower. The internet was slower and the information more avoidable; both waiting and anticipation were part of the standard framework of living. And shopping was something that required time, planning and forethought. Before the advent of yawning, warehouse-sized big-box stores, print catalogs served as portals to the future: Just opening one, Charlotte’s sister, Aimée, says, “was a completely different experience than walking into a store, because you were alone with your imagination and immersed in possibility.”

As a form of media, mail-order catalogs themselves were a story of longing and aspiration that came to define shopping as an American way of life. What you bought and where you bought it from was a statement about who you were and who you could be. This was as true of the inch-thick catalogs from department stores like Sears (whose holiday-season edition was upgraded from mere catalog to “Wish Book”) as it was of the thousands of specialty retail catalogs, from J. Crew and Tweeds to Swiss Colony and Fingerhut, that followed its lead.

(Denver Post via Getty Images) A woman shopping from a JCPenney catalog

Aimée thinks that Millennials in particular have so much nostalgia for catalogs because they were the generation that witnessed e-commerce overtake mail order. “We didn’t know at the time that the internet was going to basically turn into a 24-7 shopping mall,” intent on making shopping quotidian and constant, she says. “I think a lot of us weren’t prepared for the way that having tons of choices for what to buy and where to buy them would become kind of paralyzing.”

But there’s also a nostalgia for catalogs as self-contained and curated; a static set of choices rather than pages and pages of search results. There’s a stark contrast between the frantic sense of urgency online retail often whips up (It’s limited edition! This item never goes on sale except right now! OMG there’s only one pair left in your size!) and the catalog’s invitation to flip, peruse, think, rethink — basically, to shop deliberately rather than reflexively.

For a long time, the only catalogs that mattered to me were the ones from Scholastic Books handed out in elementary school classrooms, and the catalog from a little shop in Vermont called The Enchanted Dollhouse. The former was purpose-driven, with check boxes next to each book; the latter, pure fantasy that was much more inspirational than acquisitive. Then, at the home of my Friend With Cool Parents, I got a load of catalogs from Think Big!, a 1980s-era retailer devoted to giant versions of normally small things (crayons, paper clips, forks) and Esprit, whose catalogs were the first I’d ever seen that featured real people (often Esprit employees), modeling the label’s bright sweatshirts and shorts.

The first ever Delia's Catalog, Winter 1995.

Don't say you didn't read it… pic.twitter.com/fDsuubYcjn

— Pulp Librarian (@PulpLibrarian) October 6, 2024

Catalogs have long had a formative impact on would-be consumers, offering a sense of aspiration on behalf of a future self, or a peek into the pasts of their loved ones. J. Crew was a revelation to one friend who was elated, at age 15, to have pages and pages of unisex garments — barn jackets, rugby shirts, roll-neck sweaters — that could be emulated with some judicious thrifting. Another noticed that his father always seemed to be in a good mood when a catalog from Orvis showed up in the mail, and was able to slowly piece together a close relationship that started when he asked his dad to explain fly fishing. A longtime IKEA enthusiast, meanwhile, described a moment of heartache when she ordered something from the company and found out that not only does the company no longer pack its latest catalog in the box with merchandise, there are no more paper catalogs at all. “The stores always stressed me out. I could go through [the catalog] in the peace and quiet of my own apartment and actually be able to breathe while browsing, then make a list, with aisle numbers, for what I wanted to buy. They have digital versions of their catalogs now, but I just can’t see that process being as fun.”

It’s too simple to say that the internet killed the catalog, especially since the demise of mail-order retail was consistently predicted as early as 1990, in a New York Times piece reporting that “Even for J. Crew, the Mail-Order Boom Days are Over”: “[T]hese are tremulous times for consumer buying, and the years of dynamic growth for mail-order catalogs are dusty memories. Even the fabled Lands’ End, one of the most successful and envied mail-order catalogue operations, has been struggling with sinking profits recently.”

Mail-order retailers actually embraced the internet fairly early on, in part because so many of them already had the fulfillment infrastructure and marketing to transition catalog customers smoothly online. In many cases, it wasn’t the internet that changed their fortunes, but financial restructurings involving private equity that turned fulfillment protocol away from customer service and toward speed and efficiency. (One former J. Crew call-center employee recalls “wanting to explain to people why they were paying more money for increasingly bad quality even though I had nothing to do with it.”)

1979 Sears catalog bathroom carpeting. Pick the one you want to die on. pic.twitter.com/myDy1B09wQ

— Nick Prueher (@nickprueher) September 1, 2016

By 2005, when the trade publication Catalog Age changed its name to Multichannel Merchant to reflect the rise of e-commerce, even legacy brands like Lands’ End and L.L. Bean could see that the future of mail-order retail was online, even if many of their customers remained staunchly analog. E-commerce scaled and sped everything up; even dELiA*s successful proto–fast-fashion model, which gave customers access to trends while they were still peaking, couldn’t match the European fast-fashion juggernaut of H&M, Zara, Mango and more that arrived in the United States in the early 2000s. Charlotte wonders if what resonates with Gen-Z about dELiA*s-era mail order might be the gap between when items were ordered and when they arrived: “You had a few weeks of imagining how this cargo skirt or that track jacket was going to make you just a little bit more confident, and that was a lot of the magic.” It’s not that the clothes were ever disappointing, she clarifies — it’s just that the anticipation was such a big part of the process.

The diminishing returns of instant gratification might explain why catalogs are nearly always, according to trade publications and business journals, on the verge of a renaissance. Even Amazon can recognize the importance of a piece of direct mail that makes holiday shopping less likely to cause choice paralysis. But retail businesses have in many cases lost the consumer trust that originally made their catalogs a promise of consistency and quality. What customers are more likely to count on these days is that corporate restructuring will result in worse quality — erratic sizing, cheaper materials, and more slapdash production — and a matching level of customer service.

Meg and Hamilton Swan, the insufferable yuppies of “Best in Show,” are introduced in the mockumentary rhapsodizing about the ease of mail-order shopping (“We are so lucky to have been raised amongst catalogs”), particularly as it sidesteps the need to talk to strangers in person. It’s tempting to think that if the Swans were shopping in 2026, they’d be longing to once again hear the friendly tones of an  L.L. Bean representative rather than deal with yet another AI assistant on the website from a company whose parent company is plagued by data leaks.

Online shopping, says Charlotte, “is something I avoid, especially as I get older — I just don’t have the patience to decode the sizing differences of four different brands selling basically the same shirt.” She and Aimée have joked about the prospect of starting a dELiA*s for middle-aged former indie girls, but it always ends, she says, “with us on Instagram, looking for something we know is already out there.”

The post The mail-order catalog disappeared. Can it be revived? appeared first on Salon.com.

Plenty of people who saw the video of a 65-year-old grandfather being tossed in the air like a rag doll by a bison in Yellowstone National Park last weekend assumed that the man must have gotten close enough to the animal to piss it off. At Yellowstone, which has the largest population of the majestic animals, bison attacks are rare relative to the number of park visitors overall. But the animals often called fluffy cows have also racked up the most human-involved injuries of any Yellowstone resident — and last weekend’s attack was the second this summer.

But Carl McDaniel and his 13-year-old grandson, who visit Yellowstone every year, were abiding by the park’s guidance and giving the animal plenty of space, according to Mike MacLeod, a professional wildlife photographer who witnessed the incident. The same bison had charged through the campground minutes before, sending tourists scrambling, and was resting on a patch of ground when the man and his grandson came into view. “They were walking along the road, quite a ways away from the bison, and it started running at them,” MacLeod told Cowboy State Daily, theorizing that a pickup truck driving into the bison’s sightline at the same moment might have agitated it.

McDaniel told CNN that as he lay on the ground after being flipped by the bison, it stood over him. “He could have stomped on me, he could have gored me, he could have done almost anything to take my life, but he did not do so.” Instead, MacLeod and a group of other campers made enough noise to make the bison leave. With one leg broken in 4 places, McDaniel was rushed to the hospital and into surgery. According to MacLeod, McDaniel’s grandson said that his grandfather wanted to see the video to make sure he hadn’t done anything to cause the attack. MacLeod is certain he didn’t. “You can tell in the video it’s not his fault. You can tell from the very beginning.”

Assumptions that the man had breached the bison’s personal space are understandable, given that bison in natural parks are frequently underestimated by visitors attempting to interact with them. A 2024 tweet from the National Parks Service referenced the danger with a message that read, “Believe in yourself like visitors who believe they can pet a bison.”

But despite common-sense warnings to avoid approaching or interacting with animals in the wild, humans continue to press their luck and, in many cases, suffer exactly the consequences you’d expect. In January, a skier in China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region was mauled by a snow leopard while trying to take a selfie from an estimated 10 feet away; visitors had been warned the previous day about a leopard sighting.

In February 2025, a Canadian visitor to Turks and Caicos attempted a similar stunt with a shark and suffered so much damage to her hands that both had to be amputated. A few months later, a diver and father of four strapped on a GoPro, jumped into the shark-filled water off the coast of Israel and never returned. Not long after that, a Florida man with no permit for shark fishing posed with a recently caught lemon shark and was way too surprised when the fish whipped around and chomped his leg.

And with each visit to the beach town of Hobart, Tasmania’s unofficial ambassador Neil the Seal draws a bigger audience that includes a handful of people approaching him for selfies. The 5-year-old, 2,000-pound elephant seal should be learning how to play-fight with other juvenile males; instead, in their absence, he fights fences and traffic bollards. The people getting within a few yards of him for action shots have Tasmanian wildlife officials bracing for tragedy every time the seal hauls himself ashore. (Neil flerped back out to sea last weekend, presumably to find a less stressful place to molt).

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“Generally, if an animal is alert to your presence, you’re already too close,” says Shervin Hess, conservation manager at Portland’s Oregon Zoo. And because humans have grown comfortable — perhaps too comfortable — around wild animals in the age of social media and smartphones, more often than not it’s the animals who wind up paying for our heedlessness. Here are a few things to keep in mind when you cross paths in the wild.

They’ve already had enough of us

This week, the president of the United States announced a change in the wording of the Endangered Species Act, which was signed into law in 1973. Its original wording defines the word “harm” as “an act which actually kills or injures wildlife. Such an act may include significant habitat modification or degradation where it actually kills or injures wildlife by significantly impairing essential behavioral patterns, including breeding, feeding or sheltering.”

There have been previous efforts to downgrade “significant habitat modification or degradation,” removing it from the category of “harm” and putting it into more of a “sucks for you” category. But as of July 14, the definition has been altered, and previously protected wildlife habitats are now fair game for developers — which means, among other things, that species and habitat-recovery programs are now in jeopardy. A statement from Bart Melton of the Conservation Association of National Parks noted that the change “defies common sense, science, and paves the way for mining, oil and gas drilling, logging, and development in areas that are crucial to the survival of some of our most vulnerable species. This rule ignores decades of conservation science and could undermine recovery efforts for more than 600 species.”

Infrastructure development, deforestation, pollution and urban sprawl have already caused rampant global habitat loss. Research from the Environmental Protection Agency found that in the United States alone, hundreds of species have gone extinct in the last century. Changes to habitats don’t need to be huge or systemic to have disruptive effects on wildlife, Hess says; in 2021 an illegal drone that crashed into a protected seabird nesting ground in Southern California caused panicked adult birds to flee, abandoning an estimated 2,000 eggs.

It’s important to consider our conservation footprint in addition to our carbon footprint, and part of this just requires paying attention to the wildlife around us in the places we live, and the human impact on it.

Remember you’re on their turf

Golfers at an 18-hole course in my neighborhood regularly find themselves teeing off in the company of coyotes who live in the area, and there’s a tacit agreement between the animals and humans to keep a respectful distance so that both can use the space as they do. When I asked one golfer if he’d ever been tempted to take a selfie with a coyote, he said, “No, because that would be really stupid.”

Human-wildlife coexistence is necessary for maintaining biodiversity, but there’s reason to worry that some animals’ ability to tolerate humans makes too many of the latter confuse coexistence with ownership. Earlier this week, birding podcasters Victor and Ruben Stoll posted video taken in Belize’s Mountain Pine Ridge of one of them chasing and petting a jaguar cub. The tiny Central American country, home to a number of protected species, has dealt with an increase in tourist harassment of its wildlife in recent years. Speaking to a news outlet, Belize Zoo executive director Celso Poot noted that even brief handling by humans can cause long-term physiological harm to wild animals. (“It builds up stress hormones. The muscles lock up, and over time that animal can be affected.”)

These incidents aren’t isolated. The black bear cub pulled from a tree next to an apartment complex by residents who wanted a selfie; the freshwater crocodile grabbed by a Canadian influencer who mocked its cries of protest; the baby wombat pulled screaming from its mother by an American influencer all occurred in pursuit of content and social-media clout. And none of the humans involved, at least so far, have faced consequences severe enough to deter others from doing the same.

“Humans have to remember that we are on their turf,” says Hess, who works with global species-recovery and wildlife-restoration organizations in his capacity as a conservation expert. “When there’s a baby seal sitting alone on a beach, it’s not because it’s stranded, but because the mother has parked it there while she goes fishing.” In other words, just because it’s there doesn’t mean you’re entitled to pet it.

Seriously, put your phone away.

It’s alarming that this no longer goes without saying, but here we are. To be clear, it is perfectly understandable that you want to take selfies with wild animals. “Animals are amazing. Seeing one in the wild is like seeing a celebrity,” says Hess. “And that can make people lose their common sense.”

This is an understatement. The number of people who either take or attempt to take selfies with wild animals grew so rapidly on Instagram in the 2010s that World Animal Protection introduced 2017’s Wildlife Selfie Code, which delivers a pop-up message (“You are searching for a topic that may be associated with posts that encourage harmful behavior to animals and the environment”) to anyone searching the app for hashtags like #slothselfie.

The demand for wild-animal selfies fuels illegal operations like the exotic-pet trade and exploitative tourism-focused practices like Thailand’s tiger-selfie industry. These, in turn, make abuse of the animals themselves routine (tigers are often beaten, starved and drugged to make them docile and photo-ready), but also impede broader conservation projects. “It can be really hard when you see so many other people doing it,” says Hess. “But you can be the person who says, ‘Hey guys, let’s back up, let’s put away the phones.’”

Even when human-wildlife interactions don’t result in catastrophe, the desire to own or claim animals to prove that we have done so isn’t the same thing as loving them. And giving animals space, not demanding their attention and not treating them like props isn’t just respectful coexistence — it can save would-be action photographers hurt and embarrassment. The woman whose hands were bitten off in Turks and Caicos wanted a unique snapshot for social media; instead, she will always be known as the woman who tried to take a selfie with a shark, and there’s no coming back from that.

For Hess, simply being in the presence of a polar bear in the Arctic or an orangutan in Borneo means much more than capturing them in photos. “Wild animals are so awe-inspiring,” he says. “Maybe people should take something from that.”

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