Look Out: The Delight and Danger of Taking the Long View
Tuesday, October 21, 2025, was the “birthday” (release date) reading, at Left Bank Books in St. Louis, for Edward McPherson’s new book, Look Out: The Delight and Danger of Taking the Long View. McPherson, who teaches creative writing at WashU and is a contributing editor for this publication, is the author of three previous books of nonfiction, including The History of the Future: American Essays.
McPherson described how COVID disrupted the process of writing Look Out, which became something he had not planned. While he did not fully explain his original intent, the book ended up being a work of mixed creative nonfiction modes (personal essay, immersion, travel, speculative CNF), reportage, and warning, all built on the motif of gaining elevation to see beyond our everyday ken—an ambition that comes at a price.
“Another way of putting this is to say the long view aches to escape the world it so obsessively looks upon,” he writes. “Soaring free, its fatal flaw is trying to forget the body left behind on the ground.” (240)
The book is in three chronological sections—“Before,” “Then,” and “Beyond”—which correspond to the “4 billion…more or less” years before the COVID pandemic; the height of it in 2020-22; and the “∞” after it. Along the way we see the earthen mounds of Mississippian culture, maps and the grifts associated with them, St. Louis as a cradle of aviation, the disorientation of astronauts exploring the moon, the famous photos of earth from lunar orbit and from the edge of the solar system, and the “nearly eternal Clock of the Long Now,” a massive project in Nevada being paid for by Jeff Bezos.
Elizabeth Kolbert, who is discussed and counted in the book as a friend of the author, often views environmental catastrophe and extinction through the lens of technology. McPherson has a similar interest in and approach to climate change and its causes, but the solid middle part of his book is mainly about privacy and human rights issues, viewed literally through the lenses, sensors, and chips of technologies powerful beyond earlier generations’ imagination and used to surveil, control, and punish us.
The book is in three chronological sections—“Before,” “Then,” and “Beyond”—which correspond to the “4 billion…more or less” years before the COVID pandemic; the height of it in 2020-22; and the “∞” after it.
These technologies offer what McPherson called, at the reading, “God sight” but are almost entirely in the hands of an unholy alliance of earthly corporations and governments, including the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which opened a new, 97-acre facility last month in “the heart of north St. Louis.”
A 2009 study found north St. Louis to be “the most devastated residential neighborhood…in the country” due to, among other factors over the decades, segregationist and other racist policies, economic disinvestment, a collapsing tax base, and land speculation by outsiders, who prevent stability and accelerate decline by blocking community ownership, infrastructure, maintenance, vital services, and public safety.
McPherson does a good job tying the NGA’s new campus to the ongoing displacement of north St. Louis’ generational residents, even as it brings the world’s highest tech to the city. This is one example from the book of “forget[ting] the body [politic] left behind on the ground,” as a new kind of space/drone/digital race escalates to produce the king of overwatch.
Look Out is loaded with these good news/bad news examples, starting with its foundational duality that our yearning to be free of bodily limitations has a mixed outcome. With each technological innovation it mentions, it shows that new problems are created alongside new capabilities; the first fragile airplanes let us slip our surly bonds but were also weaponized immediately for use on other people.
McPherson thickens his story by taking care to list benefits from, say, satellites so numerous in earth’s orbit that astronomers complain their views are blocked, which also provide weather prediction, climate change data, GPS, and emergency services.
There are many dichotomies in the book, an attempt to “look” thoroughly, including mentions of masses of people versus the individual experience, “the planet” versus the local/small-scale, and slow versus fast. “Ground-truthing” (240) becomes the opposite of the “long view” and its variations such as “far-ranging sight,” “aerial view,” or “overview.” The present here-and-now contrasts with “eternity,” and short-sighted plans with certain “long-term thinking.”
Look Out is not aggressively polemic; in fact McPherson insisted at his reading that he is not an expert in any of the topics he wrote about.
These attempts at fairness in vision also include McPherson’s own metanarrative comments about writing itself: “While attempting to keep many topics in view, I have tried to destabilize my own long-range reconnaissance, unsettling the bigger story with ambivalence and doubt, often by walking around on the ground.” (xiv) These tie to the ethical: “A virus—relentless, impersonal, chaotic, and alien—doesn’t care about narrative, but I do.” (246)
Look Out is not aggressively polemic; in fact McPherson insisted at his reading that he is not an expert in any of the topics he wrote about. This highlights another dichotomy at work: the often different expectations by readers of the literary-tinged and readers of, say, magazine writing with titles such as, “The E.P.A.’s Disastrous Plan to End the Regulation of Greenhouse Gases.”
Writers of creative nonfiction, who often work among poets and fiction writers (and often are those things themselves), might be expected to follow Chekhov’s belief that “The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.” They may portray the experience of being alive rather than try to find solutions to problems (which no one seems to have ) including the effects of recent collaborations between “tech bros” and authoritarianism, something that McPherson alluded to at his reading. The actions of those with power often objectively make life worse and more constrained for many. “Compassion” in literature has often historically meant something more like “bearing witness” to this, rather than “striving for policy change.”
Readers will not find many specific examples in Look Out of how to recapture personal privacy and community agency from a techno-oligarchical-authoritarian state. Ultimately, the book suggests, the world has been grinding away, four billion BCE to the start of infinity, obliterating entire civilizations such as the builders of Cahokia Mounds, which lies in ruins across the river from St. Louis. How to live with that image? (“Progress” has usually lived with that image by destroying the physical metaphor and putting up a big-box store.)
The answer the book does provide is that the best views can get to both suffering and joy, the latter being currently difficult to find in space. McPherson’s title includes the connotation of awakening to a new reality, time and again, by effort, that is more humane and realistic than the one described to McPherson by a top official at the NGA, which he says aspires abstractedly to “not only seeing but understanding everything…‘from seabed to space.’” (210)
The human choice is not just to “see,” but to pay attention. Near the end of his book, McPherson stops at the side of the road in a desert: “I can give eternity a couple hours at dusk,” he says (248), a generous act of an embodied individual.
