Data, data, data: It's all one ever hears about these days. Science is all about big data. Our bosses call out for analytics, whatever those might be. And everyone wants to predict what will happen next. Can we accurately predict if a company's stock will rise, whether or not a disease will spread, or who will become the next President of the United States? As anyone who has ever opened up a spreadsheet groaning with weeks, months, or years of data knows, numbers aren't enough: we have to know how to make them talk. Enter Scott Page and The Model Thinker. A leading professor of quantitative social science at the University of Michigan, he has taken his expertise as both a teacher and researcher and distilled it into the one book anyone will need to master data and turn it to professional use. This is no armchair exercise in imagined understanding, like The Signal and the Noise or The Black Swan or a legion of books on networks, the purposes of which are to make us look good in