LOOK AGAIN

A man discovers that two people standing four feet apart can watch the same four seconds and walk away with two entirely different streets.

That question follows him home.

Retired and self-taught, he begins what he expects to be a straightforward project: hand-grinding a twelve-inch telescope mirror from a disc of glass that has been sitting forgotten in his garage. Instead, the work becomes a year-long investigation into seeing - into how attention selects, memory reconstructs, and expectation quietly shapes the world we think we're looking at.

Along the way: a window that was never there, a prediction that goes wrong, a garden-glove experiment with his nine-year-old granddaughter, an old telescope maker who knows exactly where to look, and a wife whose own year-long project he very nearly misses entirely while he's consumed by his.

LOOK AGAIN moves between a real, physical craft - the patient, exacting work of grinding glass into a mirror by hand - and the science of attention, memory, and prediction, without ever losing the workshop, the marriage, or the man at its center. It's a book about what it costs, and what it's worth, to close the gap between what happens in front of us and what we actually experience of it.

For readers of Four Thousand Weeks and Shop Class as Soulcraft - a book about craft, attention, and what we miss while we're looking right at it.