WashU professor’s book explores the power and privilege of seeing from above

Support comes from Mosby Building Arts. Sometimes the smaller home projects make the biggest difference. Mosby creates custom spaces that help you love your home even more. For projects big and small, visit callmosby.com. This is St. Louis on the air from St. Louis Public Radio. I'm Elaine Cha. For centuries, humans have longed to look down on the earth, or at the very least, to gain an elevated perspective. There are plenty of examples of that here in the St. Louis region, from the mounds built by the Mississippian people in present-day Collinsville to the aerial surveillance of the National Jus Spatial Intelligence Agency in St. Louis. On today's show, we are revisiting our December 2025 conversation with Edward McPherson, author of the book, Look Out, The Delight and Danger of Taking the Long View. In it, he writes, The Spirit of St. Louis has always longed for the air. McPherson is a professor of English at Washington University. He talked with producer Alex Hoyer. Welcome to St. Louis on the air, Edward. Grateful to be here. Thanks, Alex. So this book is really grounded in St. Louis. There are so many St. Louis references throughout this book, from Forest Park to the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. But I want to start with talking about maps because the book is about perspective and you talk about maps quite a bit and you talk about your love of maps, particularly old maps. Why do you love old maps? I'm just a sucker for, I think, the fever dream of an intricate map. The idea that if you are just diligent enough and careful enough that you can record everything and get it all down right where it is in space and time. And of course, that's as the book unravels, is a pure fantasy. But I find the impulse so interesting, our kind of constant urge for perspective. And then the flip side, how we often end up losing it. You did a lot of research for this book, and you looked at a lot of old maps. What were some of your favorites, or maybe not necessarily favorites, but ones that were helpful to you in writing the book? Right. Well, favorite is kind of complicated because as much as I find these, there's a whole section on early 19th century birds' eye view maps. American towns and sort of the mania that grips the country for those maps. And of course, they're oversized, they're aesthetically striking. They're remarkable. They were made by these itinerant artists who basically wandered the country and would draw small towns as if they'd gone up in a hot air balloon. But that was a fiction. They just knew good Renaissance perspective drawing, and they just walked the town until they got all the details, right? So those were fascinating. They're also, of course, deeply problematic because they're sort of pure colonial gaze. They're tied to commerce and expansion. They leave out just as much as they show, including the people who are on the land first. So I find them really interesting and the sort of imagination in them.

compelling, but they're, you know, they're difficult to look at for lots of reasons. My favorite St. Louis map is one I think we both like is the Compton and Dry map from 1875. And that is the city subdivided in about, I think is 110 plates. And it goes sort of section by section. And it's just, and it's an aerial perspective. But it's so detailed and so large. It's an atlas. It's not all one. piece of paper. And I find that map just completely compelling. I expected that we would talk about this. I had hoped that we'd talk about the Compton and Dry Map. The Missouri History Museum several years ago had this on display and it's nine by 24 feet. and the exhibit was called a walk in 1875 St. Louis. And anticipating that we'd talk about this specific map, I looked it up on the Library of Congress. And it noted that the Library of Congress's geography and map division has over 1,700 panoramic maps. And it says that one item stands out above all the others as one of the crowning achievements of the art. And it points to... this map of what life in St. Louis would have looked like in 1875. Why is it such an important snapshot, not just in St. Louis history, but in trying to get a perspective of what life is like? I mean, that map particularly, which doesn't, it's in the introduction to the book, but it doesn't figure too largely in my section about these sort of... this burgeoning fervor for these maps, mainly because a lot of it was about sort of westward expansion, the maps I looked at. I would go down to Texas, and there's a big archive of them in Fort Worth. Again, I think it's just that fantasy that we can actually catalog everything, which is revealing and interesting, and historians use these maps all the time to figure out how things were back then. But it's also interesting for what the maps leave out. For example. Well... I mean, I don't want to leave the Compton and Dry map aside, but there's a section in the book about the Civil War battlefield map, like the very first map of the Battle of Gettysburg, which was drawn by an artist. He started drawing it two days after the battle. So he's wandering the field. It's 1863. There are bodies and horses still, you know, bloated bodies on the field. And he's interviewing soldiers, both the North and Confederate soldiers who've been captured. And he starts to... tell the story of the Battle of Gettysburg in this map. It's a map of all the truth movements over those three days. And what's so interesting is you can see him... in this section in the book, you can see him create history. And he's telling the story. And maps are basically a way to tell a story. They're sort of useful fictions in a lot of way for better and for worse. And so you see him create sort of the story of the Battle of Gettysburg that we know from sort of Ken Burns and everything else. The pickets charge looms huge on the map. And it all comes down to this copse of trees, which is a phrase, the mapmaker invents. I mean, he sort of.

He coins it, basically, and all that flows from it, the high watermark of the Confederacy, the myth of the lost cause, comes from this story that this mapmaker makes. And he draws the copse of trees sort of over large in this very detailed perspective aerial map. Well, spoiler alert, the problem is there was no cops of trees back then. There are a few photographs of that area, and there's nothing remarkable about the trees. But because it looms so large in his imagination, that becomes the story of the Battle of Gettysburg, this pivotal place where the battle turns on which the fate of the nation hinged. And it influences the way that people today... remember and memorialize what happened there. Right. They had to encase the trees long ago in iron because souvenir relic hunters were coming to make walking sticks out of them. Why did those kinds of aerial maps fall out of favor? I mean, essentially, one was sort of technological. So they were lithographs. They were printed on a stone and then, you know, published elsewhere. So the artist would draw a map and send it back to his publisher and they were predominantly men. Send it back to a publisher and they would print it and sell it. And it was sold by... subscription. But then there are other forms of printmaking that became faster and cheaper, less detailed, less beautiful, in my opinion, and they took over. Also, flight and photography sort of was the final nail in the coffin for them. You could go up in the air and literally take a picture much faster than someone could draw it. I do want to talk about flight. And again, St. Louis plays prominently in this. You write that, quote, the spirit of St. Louis has always longed for the air. What do you mean by that? The book travels around a fair amount. Like I go to Alaska to visit some melting glaciers. I go to West Texas where billionaires are blasting themselves into space. But you're right. It's grounded in St. Louis, which I don't think. I had realized when I first moved here 13 years ago really is sort of, I think, a cradle of this aerial imagination. I mean, you can go back to Cahokia in the, you know, which 1250 is a city across the river that's bigger than London built on mounds, these giant mounds for the rulers to exercise sort of social control via oversight. You know, we're always building up, up. And of course, the mounds spilled across the river into St. Louis, and unfortunately, the St. Louis. since the city just, you know, tore through them. But going back to early experiments in ballooning and flight, Lindberg was backed by moneymen from St. Louis, Boeing, McDonald-Douglas, those companies have built missiles and fighter jets and space capsules. The NGA has been here for a long time. St. Louis produced the maps that the Apollo astronauts used to land on the moon. The aerial imagination really does have a grip.

I think, on the city and has for a long time. Well, let's go back to July 1st of 1859. Introduce us to a man named John Wise. Who was he? He was an early balloonist who, and on that day, I have to get my facts right, he goes up, he floats from downtown St. Louis all the way to upstate New York and a balloon that I believe carried him. the financial backer, maybe the person who built it, and then a journalist, an intrepid journalist who hopped into the basket at the last minute. And they just float away. And of course, you don't really control which way a balloon goes. So they're floating to see how far they get and they're having a great time shouting at riverboat captains and barking at dogs. And then they caught up in a storm and end up dashing, get dashed over Lake Ontario and wind up. remarkably safe in a tree, hanging from a tree. And then when they, someone finds them, the locals find them. They don't believe them that they came all the way from St. Louis. And they have to prove it by pulling out yesterday's newspapers. And so, you know, these balloonists would go up from St. Louis all the time. And he was a, he was one of the earlier practitioners of that. Well, I suppose they, the people in the balloon probably anticipated that people, wherever they landed up, might not believe that they had just. taken off the day before because it was rather unusual then. I mean, people just didn't really do this. It was a novelty. Yeah, I mean, it was like science fiction almost. There were like aliens landing and they would have to prove. So that's why they carried the newspapers to say, look, we were in St. Louis yesterday. You also include in the book a photo of Forest Park from 1908 with one of the founders of the St. Louis Arrow Club, and this is Albert Bond Lambert. Spoiler alert, the airport in St. Louis is named after this gentleman. That was a great photo to include. But I want to go a couple years later to September 10th of 1910, and that's when a Missouri-born man dubbed the Man Bird brought his plane to St. Louis. This is Captain Thomas. Scott Baldwin. Tell us about him. All right. So it's, what, September 1910, dashing Birdman Baldwin comes to St. Louis. The city is gripped in complete anticipation. This is going to be the first big flight in St. Louis. Everyone's really nervous that the flight won't go off because basically he's going to be riding in the air in what looks to me like a go-kart in the sky. It's an open, you know, open contrivance. It goes about 45 miles an hour is what he's hoping. He announces he's going to fly from, he's going to take off from a field next to Belfontaine Cemetery, come down the river to Cahokia Landing, which is sort of even with where the Anheiser-Bush brewery is. rest for half a second and then fly back up north. The city is absolutely excited, but they're worried it's not going to happen. And then blue flags go up across the city, which means flock to the river and supposedly 200,000 people line the levees to see him do this feat. And he makes it down.

One way, he lands, calls for water for his engine and takes back up north. He actually goes under the Eads Bridge, which delights and shocks the crowd. The crowd doesn't know, no one knows how to deal with this. The people on the ground are actually scattering when he flies over land because they've... never had a plane fly over them. They don't know what, sort of how you deal with it. And then about 40 minutes later, he lands back up at Bellefontaine Cemetery. The city goes nuts. There are all these speeches, Ballyhoo. He gets two checks, each for three grand, one from the St. Louis Post Dispatch, one from the Citizens Committee, all these, you know, talk about how St. Louis has now joined. the ranks of cities that have conquered the air, et cetera, et cetera. His wife, who's also his business manager, goes on about now. St. Louis has seen its first true flight. And of course, the irony in the book, spoiler alert, is that it wasn't the first flight in St. Louis. That had actually happened the year earlier in October, 1909, a flyer named Glenn Curtis, the first flight in St. Louis was this sort of un... unobserved early morning flight in the northwest corner of Forest Park. He takes off. He flies for under a mile. I think there are about four spectators, a woman and her two kids who just happened to be there and then a police officer. And that's the first flight. But Curtis, he attempts several more. The city's also very excited to see this, but the weather's bad. He can't stay aloft. He flies at dusk and no one can see him. I include the two stories in the book not only to show just what sort of grip the aerial imagination had on the city, but also when it comes to making history that... you know, there's usually someone who actually got there first. And when I think of historical moments in St. Louis, I often try to put myself back there. And so not only were there thousands of people lining the levees to see this. There were people on the Eads Bridge. Yeah, the newspaper claimed it was 17,000. And, you know, I'm not sure we could squeeze that many. But yeah, absolutely. And they, he was, it was very dramatic. You couldn't see him for far because apparently the, there's so much smoke from the, you know, the river traffic and everything else. And it was cloudy. There is a. photo of it that you can see and it's, you know, it's hard to see him. But he was, it was a noisy airplane and he's kind of, he was 200 pounds, he was probably a little too heavy for his craft, and he's just bobby and ducking through the air with each gust of wind. It was really dramatic flight. And I'm just imagining being on Eid's bridge and the plane coming through the steel arches, you were uncertain of whether it would be even possible. And these are the early days of flight, and you're like, ah! Yeah, and he's going 50 miles an hour by the time he goes under the bridge. And then he almost hits a smokestack of a riverboat as he's pulling up. I would classify this first part of our discussion as kind of maybe the seduction of distance or just our desire to have a...

a broader view, the long view, as you put it. But there is still a fascination with flight. I mean, there are air shows all the time. There is still an attraction when the Forest Park balloon race happens every September. Why do you think we are so... fascinated with that long view from the air, even though it's not really anything new now. Right. I mean, there's a, I mean, to point out just how not new it is, I think there's a plaster mural in Turkey, in a Neolithic village that some say is not only the first landscape painting, but also the first bird's eye view. And it's 9,000 years old. So this impulse to go up high and look down is ancient. Yeah, why is it so captivating? In the book, one of the feelings the book goes chasing is awe. I think there is a certain sort of awe when you leave Earth behind. You know, you're sort of chasing the sublime. And I think that's an interesting, powerful impulse. The problem where it takes sort of a darker turn is we go really quickly from God's sight to bomb site, you know, where we go up high and then we start to try to control things on the ground, often by raining bombs back. down on it. That's Edward McPherson, author of the book Lookout, talking with producer Alex Hoyer last December. We'll have more of their conversation in just a moment. This is St. Louis on the air on St. Louis Public Radio.

Support comes from Gemma, architects, planners and designers, seeking to bring joy to their clients and communities. The tales at J-E-M-A-S-T-L.com. Welcome back. I'm Elaine Cha. Let's return to producer Alex Hoyer's conversation with Washu Professor Edward McPherson. He's the author of the book, Look Out, The Delight and Danger of Taking the Longview. You write in the book that the first military use of airplanes was on October 22nd of 1911 when Italians launched a reconnaissance monoplane to spy on Turkish planes outside of Tripoli. And then airplanes are just a facet of war these days, now increasingly drones. But I want to focus us in terms of taking that long view with something right here in St. Louis, and that is the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency that employs about 3,100 people. here in the St. Louis area. They just in September opened their new West headquarters, which they're now calling NGA St. Louis. It was a $1.7 billion new campus in North St. Louis. Now, I've gotten notes before from NGA when we've reported on them where they don't like being called a spy agency. Is that fair? Is it fair to call it a spy agency? I mean, how do you describe what NGA does? I mean, it's semantics. They do, and they do a lot, right? They, so we can call them an intelligence agency. What they, I mean, what they do is they produce, among other things, they produce and analyze satellite images for both the military, war fighters, for politicians, also for first responders. You know, a whole, they have a whole host of things. You know, they maintain GPS, which is not only used for navigation, but also to land bombs that seek out particular coordinates. They're in charge of running the Pentagon's flagship AI initiative. So they do do a lot in terms of targeting and surveillance, but also some first response stuff. I don't know. It feels like semantics, whether we call it a spy. It's an intelligence agency. And it's long been one that deals with mapping and aerial views. The first time, even though I grew up in this area, the first time I really became aware of the kind of work that NGA did was in 2011 when Osama bin Laden was killed by a U.S. Navy SEAL team. And I learned afterwards that it was NGA here in St. Louis. that built a miniature model of the compound where bin Laden was and a life-size replica of it so that the U.S. Navy SEAL team could practice. So that was my first notion of what NGA actually did or one of the things that they do. But I really think that even though there are thousands of people in St. Louis who work there, that it really flies under the radar in St. Louis. Why do you think that is? I mean, they were, I asked the head of NGA here in town why he thought so. And he wasn't sure. You know, they don't, like a lot of intelligence agencies, they don't go bragging too often. They also were, their current compound, or the old compound, is nestled down by the river, by the old arsenal, down by the Anheiser-Bush breweries. So they're a little out of the way, maybe. But I agree that they've flown under the radar.

I mean, there's a story that a, you know, possibly in a sort of inner agency bit of competition of CIA guy told me to look up and turn me onto. And you can see the video where Obama is visiting five guys burgers in D.C. and talking to folks in line. And then there are a couple workers from the NGA and he meets them and they're telling them what they do and they're kind of aw shucks. You know, we get you a few documents every morning. And he just is kind of like, what, NGA, who now? And he doesn't, he doesn't know what they do. And what a, what a blow to them. But, you know, because literally this is an agency that had looked overwatched his inauguration, you know, not long before that. So they definitely, you know, they're consolidated from a number of other, you know, mapping and intelligence agencies. So not that many people know about them, but they do a lot. And they have a big footprint in St. Louis. And to be fair, President Obama, by the time he addressed the nation in 2011 after the killing of Osama bin Laden, he was well aware of NGA then, it seemed. Absolutely. Yeah. So I mentioned that NGA's new headquarters here opened just a couple months ago. You were at the groundbreaking in 2019. That was in November of 2019. Why did you want to go? And was it hard to go? Well, I mean, I've been following, like a lot of folks in town, I've been following the story of the site selection. You know, St. Louis won the bid to put the new complex there. There were a couple other places further out of town that were considerations. I was just starting the book. I'd done some research on early flight. I was curious about the NGA. I didn't know a ton about it. I'd heard about the demolition and clearance of the area to make... room for this site. And so I actually, I mean, it turns out intelligence agencies have publicists and communication departments. So I sent an email and they agreed oddly enough to let me attend sort of off the record. They eased me in in the parlance of my contact. And so there I was in 2019. sitting in an open field, which had once been 27 city blocks of St. Louis Place in a white tent, just a row or two behind Adam Schiff, who was currently leading impeachment hearings against President Trump, watching all these officials talk about this project and how it was going to be a new investment on the north side of St. Louis. And here we are in this, you know. what was it, 97 shovel-ready acres. And of course, there had been great ruckus from the folks who were living there who lost their homes to eminent domain. Yeah, tell us a little bit more about the neighborhood who was there. You said this is the St. Louis Place neighborhood. It is just north of the former Pruitt Igo site, which was demolished and now has the now closed hospital that Paul McKee trumpeted for some time, which... Now it's nothing. But tell us a little bit more about the neighborhood and kind of the controversy around its development. Right. Well, I mean, it's a historically black underfunded neighborhood that suffered from many of the same institutional problems that fell Pruitt Igo, honestly, which is just right across the street from the site. I mean, the old site, obviously. So, yeah, there were, I think at the time when the city...

won the bid and decided to make room for the NGA there. There were some 200 residents still living there, a number of whom did not want to leave. They lost their homes to eminent domain. They were torn down. And the... sort of cruel irony of the whole thing was that the project was sold and sort of pitched to the public by using aerial imagery. And again, I'd said that these maps and views can tell whatever story we sort of want them to. So seeing from above, it looked just like those 19th century sort of colonial expansion, Birds Eye View maps. It looked like blank space calling to be filled in. Never mind all the homes that were there, had been there, and the folks still living there. I remember one of the politicians saying that it takes people to, I'm paraphrasing, but takes people to make a neighborhood. And then one of the articles at the time someone pointed out that, well, technically that St. Louis Place area had a higher population density than Lidu. I think that was then Congressman Lacey Clay who said that. Yeah. You talked with a St. Louis place resident named Sheila Rendon. Tell us about her. She's an amazing person. She's been in the sort of struggle from the very beginning. She did not want her house taken. She was one of the protesters I actually saw. She and a number of others outside the groundbreaking in 2019. In the book, I catch up with her six years later. on the other side of the pandemic, and we meet in a park in St. Louis Place, and we talk about many of the failed promises for development, et cetera, you know, what happened. She's someone who lost her family home, you know, where her parents and her grandparents had lived, and she expected to... you know, live in for the rest of her life. To the NGA, it's basically sits right where kind of the gatehouse is on the south side of the complex. And just her frustrations with the residents not having control of their own destiny, a lot of those failed promises for quote unquote revitalization, like the hospital you were mentioning, and just sort of the string of broken promises for the neighbors. Yeah, and I know that NGA is now open there, but a lot of the employees still aren't there. The intent is to, in 2026, complete that relocation of the employees from South St. Louis to North St. Louis. And so part of this story is yet untold, but to the residents who live there, and I've driven by there too, and there just doesn't seem to be a lot of development that I recall was being promised. Right. Some of them are skeptical whether folks will leave a secure compound, you know, to go outside of it, to go have lunch and come back and what sort of development they'll be. But Sheila points out already there's limits on what can be done because it's a secure intelligence agency. Like no gas stations. No gas stations. No buildings of a certain height. Certain kinds of businesses aren't allowed because it messes with the, you know, delicate instruments inside and so on. So.

I think the people who are still there, and it is still absolutely a vibrant neighborhood, they're hopeful and they're fighting for their place. Again, I think it's a little bit of Charlie Brown in the football. They've seen this movie before. You did have an opportunity. And again, this book reads in many ways as a reflection, but as a piece of journalism. And I think it absolutely is that is heavily reported. You talked with somebody from NGA West at the time named Bill Caniano. Tell us about him. Yeah, he's the executive of NGA West. He's a long time, he's a career military and intelligence guy. And he was, I found him actually incredibly, it was an interesting interview, incredibly forthcoming, much more so than I thought. I think we shared, I don't want to put words in his mouth. I mean, he's quoted in the book, et cetera. We had a long chat. I think we share many of the same concerns with aerial images. He's someone, I think, would say that the NGA very much wants to get it right. You know, we're both concerned about accuracy. I think we just disagree and, you know, what exactly that means. Yeah.

That's Edward McPherson talking with producer Alex Hoyer. The Washoe Professor is the author of the book Lookout, The Delight and Danger of Taking the Longview. We'll have more of the December 2025 conversation after a short break. This is St. Louis on the air on St. Louis Public Radio. Welcome. If you have a smart speaker, you have access to the entire world of NPR and St. Louis Public Radio. All the latest news and all the captivating stories. Activate our voices with yours by telling your smart speaker to play St. Louis Public Radio. Welcome back. Let's return to producer Alex Foyer's conversation with Washu Professor Edward McPherson. He's the author of the book Lookout, The Delight and Danger of Taking the Longview. Taking this long view, having aerial surveillance. can have a lot of benefits with trying to fight climate change or fight forest fires or monitor the health of the ocean. And we started our section about NGA talking about its military uses. And there can be some benefits to that, but it can also come with a lot of negative consequences. And you detail some of those in the book. What is maybe one example of that? I mean... The most concrete example is simply like, you know, with distance comes danger. In some ways, with the rise of airplanes, like the Wright brothers said the airplane is going to make war obsolete because it is so destructive. Why would we ever go up in the air with something this powerful? It was this, you know, it was this echoing Cold War talk with nuclear weapons. Like it's just, it'll end wars through this sort of mutual destruction. deterrence. Well, of course, that didn't happen with airplanes. We decided we would just fly faster, higher, and stronger than the next, you know, country. So it's a little similar with drones, which is what, you know, NGA produces a lot of this drone imagery and analyzes it. You know, the mistakes of a drone strike are horrific. Even without going into the AI piece of it and what's going on in the world right now, if you look back in... 2017 when the U.S. was fighting to expel ISIS from Iraq in what the Central Command was... touting as the most precise air campaign in history. An analysis after the fact showed that one out of every five drone strikes killed a civilian. There's just so many mistakes we make from the air in our bid for mastery, in our thinking that we understand it all. We don't have that sort of ground truth. So when you're making decisions where the cost of an error are that high, and I would certainly put...

dropping bombs as one of those. You know, I don't really believe that there is much room for collateral damage. I think someone from the NGA would say we're in an arms race. And so it's, you know, if we don't do this, if we don't sudden feed our drones with AI, if we don't sort of get into these automated swarms, et cetera, if we're not using. you know, machine learning and vision to process this endless stream of visual data, then we're going to fall behind. And what do you make of that? I mean, if not this, then what? Right. I mean, I just, it's familiar language from the Cold War. You know, we need bigger, faster bombs. And I think, yes, there will always be a scary adversary. You know, they talk about the Chinese. They talk about Russia. A space war, for example? Space war. I mean, again, it's sort of, if anything, I think the book shows that some of these are cycles. This is a story that happens again and again. And you always have to be aware of someone coming to town, some sort of fast-talking huckster trying to sell you a map. Because these pictures will tell stories that we want them to. Well, and then aside from military uses, you cite an example in the book of persistent surveillance. systems, which was a company that came to St. Louis. In 2019, I think it was, trying to sell its services to monitor St. Louis crime from the skies, like another salesman, basically, using this new-ish technology. Right. And that was going to be... continual aerial surveillance from a fixed-wing Cessna, of course, not of the whole city of certain quote-unquote higher crime areas. And so you can already see how it's starting to go awry. You know, our biases are baked into this. the system. But yeah, and then that was, it was a technology developed in Iraq to track insurgents and bombing, you know, setting up roadside bombs. So what you would do is you would witness a crime and you'd be able to roll the tape back and see where the perpetrators came from and how they met up. And then also fast forward and see where they went. So this was this controversial tech flawed in its application. It had been tried secretly in Baltimore. unwittingly on the populace and then they found out and everyone got really upset. So here it was being offered to the city, folks might remember, by some funders in Texas who were going to give it to the city for free. And some people wanted it in the neighborhoods, you know, desperate enough for it. Luckily, I think, it sort of fell, it ultimately died on the fact that it's just an illegal search. You know, it's too sweeping. So, you know, it was a violation of the Fourth Amendment. But there's so many other...

examples of it. All those license plate readers across town. Are these the flock systems that you talked about in the book? Yeah, flock safety. It's an automated license plate reader. It's coupled with the AI. It's a private company that's collecting this. Your neighborhood association can put it up. They're all over town. And then they, well, one, they have this data and then they can share it with law enforcement. So it'll flag license plates that have been marked as, you know. troubling, but they also use AI to determine who's a local and who's not, and what's a suspicious convoy, and what's just a carpool. And that's, again, a level of surveillance in private hands that I think is worrisome. And I do get those press releases from the, from police departments around the area every so often being like real time crime center. And it's because of cameras like flock that do that. And then in the book, a lot of it, a lot of your personal reflections and the way that you move about the world is reflected in the book. And you even talk about how you discovered one of these cameras. Right. And, you know, I assumed it was something because it sort of got this. crunchy font, it's lowercase, it looks really friendly, and it's called flock. And I just assumed it was something that was going to, and it has a, you know, it's just stuck on a pole, basically. You don't really notice it. And I thought, oh, this is to dim the lights for migrating birds or something lovely like that, not sweep up every make model of car down to the bumper stickers that drive past this neighborhood, unwittingly every day. This isn't in the book because a lot of these stories are still unfolding, but the CEO of flock safety is super into drones now and wants to manufacture them in the U.S. And if the Trump administration loosens line of site regulations, meaning you can now fly a drone farther than you can visually see it, this, again, private company wants to sell these to like big box stores. So if you're going into a big box store and they suspect you of shoplifting, instead of stopping you in the moment, talking to you, searching your stuff, whatever, they're just going to launch a drone that's going to follow your car home and then sift through, you know, all the big data, look at your property tax records, look at your credit history, and then decide whether or not to send law enforcement to your door. Well, again, I mean, I don't want to... Orwellian nightmare is such a cliche, but here I think it's not that the tech works so well, it's that it gets it so wrong. So so many people are going to be incorrectly targeted. It's going to follow the wrong car. It's going to... sift through your data in a problematic way and tag you as quote-unquote suspicious. And yet, that CEO, I think he just told the press that he thinks within 10 years between the cameras and the drones that they could eliminate crime in America. Well, that's doubtful. And you said that you didn't really get into AI use in terms of military, but you do write in the book about NGA project. And you used a phrase that really stuck with me, like chat GPT for satellites. Explain. Well, it's, I mean, the problem is there's just a proliferation of images and data, more than any human can get through. So the idea is that we just, you know, AI sifts through everything. And, you know, in terms of targeting, and this happened, you know, as an American company named Palantir, who was assisting in the Israelis in Gaza.

that at the beginning of that conflict, the machine, the algorithm, was identifying targets 50 times faster than a human possibly could, and identifying targets not just locating somebody, but using satellite images plus signal intercepts and other things, and making a calculation, weighing the strategic value of... eliminating, killing that target with the potential cost of civilian life and then telling someone, yes, this seems like a green light or no, this is a no. You know, a lot of the places will say there's always a human in the loop who's making the final call. But my problem is that with this tech, it comes with this sheen of science. It seems dispassionate. It seems mathematical and precise when it's really not. Like the algorithms, we've made them in our own image. And they have the same biases as well. Yeah. I mean, facial recognition turns out doesn't do so well the dark of the face. It doesn't do, you know, it doesn't identify women very well or the elderly. I think you even mentioned one passage in the book that somebody had run photos of all the members of Congress through some kind of database, and it said that a certain number were wanted or something. Right. Convicted felons all. I mean, yes. So, again, it sounds comical until you're incorrectly targeted. And I mean, so Maven is what this Pentagon's initiative is. And what I heard was that... A human analyst, someone who's trained to look at these satellite images can identify a tank, I want to say, 84% of the time. Maven gets it right about 60% of the time, but that drops to 30% of it snowing. So again, when there are unintended consequences of a decision, I just completely don't trust the machines. It feels really easy to say something. It's like, oh, things are changing so rapidly or like we're living in unprecedented times because we are living in it. And it seems almost cliche, but I'm going to say that cliche phrase that it feels like we're living in unprecedented times with just the amount of technological advancement that in ways that taking this long view that aerial surveillance and whatever else, surveillance will just have. unintended consequences, but we don't even know what it might be able to do even a year or three or five years from now. Right. I mean, it is happening fast. And one of my worries is that we are trading in an effort to keep up. And again, it's this sort of arms race idea that one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said that he thought within 10 years a third of the world's armies would be robotic, which, I mean, here we're talking about autonomous swarms, robots, fighting robots, that kind of thing. But what we're trading, we're trading accuracy for speed, in my opinion. And again, that's what sort of scares me. To the book, again,

The name of the book is Lookout, the delight and danger of taking the long view. And of course, in one way that means, yes, to look out, to take that long view. But it's also a warning. So it is part delight, part warning. Which came first for you? That's good. And I appreciate you bringing us back to the, because it. Because it would be very simple if the book were just this easy binary. You know, on the ground is messy, organic. You know... true, and then the aerial view is coercive, problematic, colonial, all that stuff. But it's not just that. Like, I'm pitched in ambivalence in a lot of this material. So I appreciate you bringing us back. It was the awe that brought me to this more the dread. You know, I'm the kind of person who loves to stare out an airplane window. A view, there's a lot of views of space and into space in the book, and I'm someone who just loves to have the baseline, the sort of mouth-breathing baseline of my day-to-day drop out. when I'm looking at a picture of Earth from 4 billion miles away. I think that's really useful and fascinating. I'm drawn to what's called the allocentric view. The egocentric view is where everything relates back to the self. The alicentric view is where we start to relate objects. to each other, leaving us out of it. And I think that's really important consideration. What's a good example of that for a way that people could wrap their heads around that? I mean, just, you know, a math, I mean, in some ways, that is the long view. It's taking, it's removing the human. It's not like, you know, here's how far away things are from me. Here's how far away things are from each other. And so. philosophically I think this gets us to like sacrifice you know I'm no longer driven by ego or community all these things that are important so the book yeah yeah long look out as certainly an imperative as a title but I think it cuts two ways it's both you know, an urgent warning, like you said, look out with distance comes danger. Don't forget that. But also a bit of a sort of hopeful wish, which is, you know, try to see beyond the self. It's a reminder to keep your head up. We don't get too far if we have our nose pressed to the ground. Mm-hmm. And it. Not everyone feels the same. I mean, we can't expect people to feel the same about anything. And at different points in the book, you mentioned both Jerry Seinfeld and William Shatner. With Jerry Seinfeld, you say, that he used to hang photos from the Hubble telescope in the Seinfeld Writers' Room to calm himself down because he found his own significance freeing. And then with William Shatner, he went up in one of those Jeff Bezos Blue Origin rockets.

And he said, quote, and this is a quote you include in the book, everything I had expected to see was wrong. There was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold. All I saw was death. And in some ways, those two things are similar, but they're also very different ways of feeling about this long view. Right. And, you know, again, one of the moves in the book is to... tell folks beware over and over someone comes to town trying to sell you a map. And I'm quite aware in the writing of the book that a book is, you know, what is a book but another kind of map? So I try to destabilize a lot of that in the book. It's broken up into sections, allowing readers to sort of try to make some connections on their own or even argue back and resist my take on things. So, yeah, ideally it's the kind of thing that gets people thinking and talking and maybe making connections on their own. You don't have to buy my ground truth, but somehow all of our collective ground truths make some sort of capital T truth. And I spent a little bit of time with the book. I mean, I could have read it in a couple sittings, but particularly in the first part of the book, I would read a section about maps or about... early flights and balloons and I would sit with it or the part that you wrote about battles. And I would sit with it for a little bit and think of how I move myself throughout the world. But it occurred to me, was this an argument of that you should look at more of the trees and not just the forest? Sure. I mean, definitely. Because I think, well, but also look at the forest because in the forest there was wonder. Right. You see my dilemma. Right. Well, again, I'm not sure. It's hard for me to see the book as an argument, maybe more of a performance. Like this is how I saw and thought about things during these years. And it's very much sort of grounded in space and time where I was. The pandemic actually plays a sort of pivot. in the book when I thought space and time became sort of deranged for a lot of folks. So, yeah, I think it's how I saw or I wanted to see. So by the end of the book, if there is some kind of takeaway, it's to try to see not, and this is not a huge surprise probably, that it's not an either or, but it's an and it's a very unsettled and uneasy and, like how you see both far out and close up in this sort of unsettled stereoscope, I think is what I was trying to do. What it might look like to do that. And where I settled on is that. I kind of settled on that and, but it also depends on the situation. Of course. Yeah. Right, right. Depending on what you're using the Longview for. Right. How did you go about researching this book? I mean, you mentioned 2019. Is that when it started? Probably a little, a few years before that. I mean, I think I've probably been kicking some of these ideas around, I don't know, almost 10 years. But yes, I was starting to do some research on early flight.

particularly what was going on in Forest Park, which is not far from where we live. I went to the NGA groundbreaking. I flew drones with a landscape photographer. So that was happening. And then the pandemic happened. And I didn't do any writing because, like a lot of folks, I sort of didn't have bandwidth, but it really crystallized a lot of the book. And one of the threads in the book is... More metaphorical is how little age history becomes capital age history, how we tell these stories about the times we're living in. And that takes a certain perspective and remove to coalesce into some sort of totalizing narrative. So that suddenly changed things a lot. And then luckily, I was very fortunate. I received a Guggenheim Fellowship that gave me a year off to write. And that's when I finished the book. In terms of how it actually came together, like most of my books, it was obsession. One topic at a time. Yeah, I mean, how did you just not get lost in maps for days and days where maybe you did? Well, I did. I mean, it's messy and inefficient, and it probably makes me a difficult person to sit next to at a dinner party or live with. You know, because there's endless stuff that I get obsessed with, and then only a fraction of it makes it into the book. But... It gets put together rather monomaniacly. I do one thread and write it up, and then I go back and tackle the next. And again, the book kind of weaves these things together, and it's doing its own kind of long-range reconnaissance. So I tried to destabilize that as much as I could by going somewhere and walking around on the ground. Edward McPherson is the author of Lookout, The Delight and Danger of Taking the Longview. He's also an associate professor of English and the director of English undergraduate studies at Washington University. Thanks for joining me today. Thanks so much for having me. Our thanks to producer Alex Hoyer for that conversation. It originally aired in December of 2025. And, by the way, McPherson's book was one selected by local librarians on this show as a best book of 2025. They noted, quote, it offers striking insights and several memorable moments that reward readers willing to follow. You can see more books on that list. Just visit stlpr.org slash best books 2025. And if there's a local author who has a new book you think we should read, let us know. Just email us at talk at s tlpr.org.

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