Looking Out: An Interview with Edward McPherson on Perspective, History, and the Long View

Edward McPherson: First, thank you, Tony, for such a thorough and generous review of the book! I am very grateful for your close attention. It truly means a lot.

Tony Huang: My pleasure, Edward. In fact I found myself in awe with every page of your book. I’m curious what inspired you to write Look Out, a book that explores humanity’s fascination with perspective and the long view? 

Look Out: the Delight and Danger of Taking the Long View, by Edward McPherson (Astra House, Oct 2025)

Edward McPherson: Well, I’ve been thinking about the book for nearly a decade, but the bulk of the manuscript came together somewhat quickly after the fallow years of pandemic when I didn’t write at all. I only had snippets of moments and ideas, including a long middle section—but I needed to go back and finish off the beginning and end. Not the usual process for me! I’m typically more linear. But thanks to a Guggenheim Fellowship, I was able to write the rest of the book over 12 monomaniacal months.

But as I said, this stuff had percolating for me for a while in light of, well, everything. I admit that at a glance the book might look like an eccentric collection of topics: drone strikes, early flight, old maps, melting glaciers, pandemic narratives, panopticons, AI, indigenous mounds, outer space, perpetual clocks, futurist societies, spy agencies, and so on. To me, it all feels so timely—and in close conversation. Personally I’ve always been drawn to long views. I will stare endlessly out of an airplane window. I swoon at videos from space or a shot of the moon’s shadow racing across the earth. I love an intricate map. Basically, I’m a sucker for the sublime, particularly as a way of escaping the mouth-breathing humdrum of my typical day-to-day. There’s a kind of scary comfort in approaching something bigger than the self. A way to short-circuit the endless static that seems to fill my head as I muddle my way, ever distracted, through the world.

Some of this thinking, of course, was sharpened by the pandemic, when many were so lonely together. And in general I find myself somewhat stupidly surprised to be growing older, to see my young daughter growing up. But the fixation feels more than just a middle-aged moment (though, sure, I had woken up one day to find myself suddenly middle-aged). I’ve long been interested in history, the stories we tell about ourselves, real and imagined. I’m drawn to lists, catalogs, and archives, however incomplete, those doomed fantasies of erudition that try to collect everything, to keep loss at bay. So I like to write about a particular brand of American amnesia, or ignorance—how the past endlessly erupts into the present all over this country, no matter how much we try to erase or forget it. And obviously the very recent history of the past few years—which one day will become our shared History—has thrown these ideas into stark relief. The pandemic. The struggles for justice—a long, slow arc that takes no small amount of faith to see. New sweeping (and deeply flawed) technologies of power and control. The social distance that seems to be collapsing and expanding in strange new ways. The book wonders what it might mean both literally and metaphorically to peer from a distance, or even over the horizon, to step back and try to see a bigger picture—certainly in space, maybe even in time. The double-edged power of perspective. The view of the gods: privilege, authority, insight, violence, erasure, awe. Delight and danger. Truth and lies. I was excited by the challenge to keep so many disparate topics in view.

Tony Huang: Can you explain the historical roots of our desire to see from above, such as the ancient Greeks’ concept of “Catascopos” and early mound-building civilizations? 

Edward McPherson: The impulse is far older than the Greeks. Something about the view from above seems innate. Children as little as three can use aerial images to find hidden treasure; these skills appear across cultures. There’s a plaster mural in the Late Neolithic village of Çatalhöyük that many say is not only the oldest landscape painting, but the earliest bird’s-eye view. It was made some 9,000 years ago. Humans seem to have always ached to flyer higher and see farther.

For example, St. Louis, where I live, was basically built atop the biggest, most complex Pre-Columbian settlement north of Mesoamerica, a metropolis that today we call Cahokia that at its height—around 1100 to 1200 CE—included some 20,000 people spread over six miles along the Mississippi. Dwellings were built on mounds that were plotted to align with the moon and sun. Researchers believe religious and social control were based on oversight—the chief balanced concerns between the upper and lower worlds from atop a giant central earthwork. In 1250, Cahokia was larger than London. About hundred years later, the site was abandoned. In the 19^th-century, St. Louis was often called “Mound City”—before its citizens razed and looted what was left of the mounds still rising all over town. Today only one remains, partly damaged, on land recently purchased by the Osage Nation.

Tony Huang: How have myths and early technologies, like Alexander the Great’s mythical flying chariot or Chinese war kites, reflected this longing for elevated perspectives? 

Edward McPherson: Well, it’s a quick slip from bird’s-eye to bombsite. The high ground offers power, control, and an (often inflated!) sense of mastery. It seems unfortunately common that once we’re flying high we then get the desire to rain down destruction on what (or who) has been left back on the ground.

Tony Huang: In the 19th century, America experienced a surge of “bird’s-eye view mania” with panoramic city maps. What were the social and cultural motivations behind these maps? 

Edward McPherson: These maps were everywhere! Churned out by itinerant artists wandering the country and sketching towns, large and small, as if viewed from a hot air balloon. (But really just drawn with skillful aerial perspective after thoroughly walking the ground.) Part flex (literally putting your town on the map!), part civic advertisement (to lure new settlement and business), these lithographs were sold by subscription and of course say just as much about the people who were doing the looking as what was (or had been) really there. That is, the maps erased as much as they revealed. Your classic colonial gaze. But they were large, colorful, and plentiful—and artistically, aesthetically striking.

Tony Huang: You describe some historical panoramic maps as “useful fictions.” Could you expand on this idea and its implications? 

Edward McPherson: Well, in a navigational sense you can’t go very far—or at least not very efficiently—with your nose pressed to the ground. You’ve got to lift your head. Look around. A map (or a plan) sutures the local and global, shows the way from here to there. Maps of course also hide as much information as they hold—just think of elision, concision, all that’s left out. I’ve already pointed to the problems with this kind of exercise, but it’s important to note such views are one way for us to sense patterns. To tell stories—for better or worse.

More philosophically, this is how we see beyond our immediate selves: lose our tiresome individual concerns and maybe start thinking about something (or someone) else. We escape the egocentric view—where everything ties back to the self—and start to relate objects directly to each other, leaving us out of the picture. Enter notions such as awe, humility, community. Not to belabor the point, but maps are made up—and thus can steer us both right and wrong.

Tony Huang: How did these idealized long views, such as city maps predicting railroads or John B. Bachelor’s Gettysburg drawing, shape collective memory or historical narratives? 

Edward McPherson: Again I think it’s useful to consider maps as stories. As the saying goes, “the map is not the territory,” but the map can make the territory. Often by making a place seem “empty” (and thus calling for construction, conquest, settlement, etc.). I’m talking about the typical land grab. But when it comes to pinning down “history,” such as Bachelder’s intricate and hugely influential map of troop movements at Gettysburg—which he started making two days after the battle, while bloated bodies still lay on the field—here he’s shaping the story we (as a nation) will come to tell about Gettysburg, and the Civil War in general, how the struggle turned, what it all meant, and so on. Stories upon stories. We see history become History.

Tony Huang: Shifting from historical maps to the iconic “Blue Marble” photo from Apollo 17, how did seeing Earth from space alter global consciousness and environmental awareness? 

Edward McPherson: Well, I wasn’t alive back then, but the “Blue Marble”—and similar pictures of the entire planet hanging in cold dark space—has been said to have fueled everything from the 1960s counterculture (a la the hippie Whole Earth Catalog) to the burgeoning environmental movement (the precarity of our planet grasped at a glimpse) to a rise in a kind of kumbaya globalism (we’re all in this together, etc.). Somewhat similarly, astronauts (and now space tourists) have talked of the “overview effect,” the consciousness-raising that supposedly comes from seeing the planet from above. A radical shift in personal perspective.

Space pictures can indeed send my mind reeling, but I think it will be interesting to see what happens when human eyes behold the whole earth again for the first time since 1972, most likely next year when NASA’s Artemis mission hopes to fly a human crew around the moon. We could certainly use a global epiphany, a dose of clarity and compassion. Fingers crossed, I guess.

Tony Huang: Despite the powerful emotional impact of viewing Earth from afar, what limitations does such a distant perspective impose on our understanding of complex realities? 

Edward McPherson: At the risk of repeating myself, I’d say the long view obscures as much as it exposes. It wants to forget what’s on the ground—which is where most of us live. To switch metaphors, politicians, planners, tech gurus, and warfighters are always pointing to the forest, not the trees, when they make their big decisions (tracing viruses, crimes, trends, populations, housing, and such through big data, AI, urban planning, mass surveillance, satellite images, what have you)—which is fine, unless you’re the tree that’s going to get (sometimes metaphorically, sometimes quite literally) cut down.

Tony Huang: Your book discusses the militarization of aerial and satellite perspectives—from early aviation bombing tests to modern drone warfare. What are the moral and human consequences of controlling from a distance? 

Edward McPherson: I feel my answers are skewing somewhat abstract, so here’s a tangible and hopefully starkly obvious example. When you’re dropping bombs from afar, you’re removed from the consequences. Now for whom is that view safer? Certainly not those on the ground accidentally caught in the crosshairs. Mistakes are costly—and frequent. (Again, the long view misunderstands, inevitably falls short.) How many dead civilians are we willing to stomach as collateral?

Tony Huang:  How do contemporary mass surveillance technologies continue the theme of the “long view,” and what privacy or ethical challenges do they raise? 

Edward McPherson: Mass surveillance runs on artificial intelligence, and big pictures fail even more when automated. It’s like throwing gas on what already might be a tire fire. Making matters worse, we trust the algorithm way too much, give the supposedly “all-seeing” machine (which has been made in our image and inherited our flaws, shortcomings, and biases) vastly too much credit. So not only do these technologies hijack your privacy, but they also put you at risk of being incorrectly targeted. Bad things happen next.

Tony Huang:  Climate change is a major challenge that demands long-term thinking. How does the “long view” help or hinder our response to environmental crises? 

Edward McPherson: Again, we’re playing with a double-edged sword. Satellite pictures, remote sensing, big aggregations of data all make it appallingly clear that these are wide patterns of devastation we’re causing, not isolated/idiosyncratic incidents. Simply put, they provide proof of climate change. But zoom too far out and any sort of crisis can be bent—often by someone with a vested interest in downplaying the urgency—to look normal. From a remove, a curve can look flat. Or just part of a cycle or trend. No big deal. The long view can feel dispiriting. We all die. None of this seems to matter, really, from a universe away. And that’s a problem—we really don’t need any more ways to dodge our own complicity in this mess we have made.

Tony Huang:  Finally, your book suggests a tension between the clarity gained from the long view and the loss of human connection on the ground. How can we better bridge this gap to avoid detachment and promote responsible understanding?

Edward McPherson: That’s the question, isn’t it? How do we walk the knife’s edge? (Between seeing the big picture and erasing all that’s on the ground.) As you suggest, the answer is probably not “either/or” but “and.” In the book I try to perform what it might look like to see in an unstable stereoscope, to pledge uneasy fidelity to a kind of doubled sight (far out/close up). Basically, the book stages a series of views, all in attempts to dramatize these abstract ideas without falling prey to the same problematic habits of thinking. (I myself am struggling to corral a disparate constellation of topics into a single view!) I tried to lean into that ambivalence, which felt potentially constructive. To remain deeply suspicious of my own project, my position in this, to unsettle the big picture while still taking something from it and offering it to a reader. Ultimately, I hope to encourage everyone to “look out”—both as a warning and a suggestion, or maybe even a call to action.

This all might sound fine and brave, but I want to end by repeating one of the points I make again and again in the book: Beware anyone coming to town trying to sell you a map. And isn’t a book just like a map? Maybe, at best, this one will encourage you to seek out your own.

Tony Huang: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us!

Edward McPherson: Thanks for the conversation!

Edward McPherson is the author of three nonfiction books: Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat (Faber & Faber), The Backwash Squeeze and Other Improbable Feats (HarperCollins), and The History of the Future: American Essays (Coffee House Press). His next book, Look Out: the Delight and Danger of Taking the Long View (Astra House), will be published in October 2025. He has written for the New York Times Magazine, the Paris Review, Tin House, the American Scholar, the Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, Salon, the Southern Review, the New York Observer, I.D., Esopus, Epoch, Essay Daily, Catapult, True Story, Literary Hub, Guernica, and Talk, among others.

Tony Huang, PhD, is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Hong Kong Review. He is also the founder of Metacircle Fellowship, Metacircle (Hong Kong) Culture and Education Co., Ltd. and Metaeducation. He works as a guest-editor for SmokeLong Quarterly. His poems and translations have appeared in Mad Swirl, The Hong Kong Review, The Best Small Fictions Anthology Selections 2020, Tianjin Daily, Binhai Times, SmokeLong Quarterly, Nankai Journal, Large Ocean Poetry Quarterly, Yangcheng Evening News and other places.

Copy editor: Nancy He