"High flying and impressively grounded… an exhilarating and urgent reckoning with human perspective.”
—Walter Johnson, author of The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States


As if Borges and Didion took a tour with Sebald through the beauty and terror of our present and past, Look Out is a profound and prismatic investigation of taking the long view.


Look Out is an exploration of long-distance mapping, aerial photography, and top-down and far-ranging 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, astronauts, artists, inventors, and dreamers, 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.