In the tradition of The Empathy Exams and Uncommon Measures, Look Out is a profound and prismatic investigation of taking the long view.
Look Out is an investigation of long-distance mapping, aerial photography, and top-down perspectives-from pre–Civil War America to our vexed modern times of drone warfare, hyper-surveillance at home and abroad, and quarantine and protest. Blending history, reporting, personal experience, and accounts of activists, programmers, spies, architects, artists, and entrepreneurs, Edward McPherson reveals that to see is to control-and the stakes are high for everyone.
The aerial view-a position known in Greek as the catascopos, or "the looker-down"-is a fundamentally privileged perspective, inaccessible to those left on the ground. To the earthbound, (in)sights from such rarified heights convey power and authority. McPherson casts light on our fetishization of distance as a path to truth and considers the awe and apocalypse of taking the long view. Edward McPherson is the author of Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat, The Backwash Squeeze and Other Improbable Feats, and The History
of the Future: American Essays. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize among other prizes He teaches creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis.
