A Model World

A story collection from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, “one of his generation’s most eloquent new voices” (The New York Times). With his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon announced his presence as a literary wunderkind of style and substance. A Model World and Other Stories only burnished his reputation as a distinctive prose stylist. In eleven elegant tales—some of them linked—by the New York Times–bestselling author of Telegraph Avenue and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Chabon’s singular characters hold tight to private dreams even as their closest relationships crumble. Five stories follow an anxious adolescent from the beach vacation where he learns of his parents’ divorce to the confused days of a woefully misguided crush. Others find ex-lovers tormenting each other at an oceanside café, a washed-up professional baseball player attending a teammate’s funeral, and a Pittsburgh disc jockey still pining for a woman who married him to get her American citizenship. “Chabon moves across powerful emotional ground with certainty and delicacy,” raves the Chicago Tribune. “There are heartbreaking moments in these stories, but they are rendered so precisely, through incidents that capture the subtlest of feelings, that the reader can only smile at Chabon’s skill.” This ebook features a biography of the author.

During the last two centuries, the way economic science is done has changed radically: it has become a social science based on mathematical models in place of words. This book describes and analyses that change - both historically and philosophically - using a series of case studies to illuminate the nature and the implications of these changes. It is not a technical book; it is written for the intelligent person who wants to understand how economics works from the inside out. This book will be of interest to economists and science studies scholars (historians, sociologists and philosophers of science). But it also aims at a wider readership in the public intellectual sphere, building on the current interest in all things economic and on the recent failure of the so-called economic model, which has shaped our beliefs and the world we live in.

What has gone wrong with economics? Economists now routinely devise highly sophisticated abstract models that score top marks for theoretical rigour but are clearly divorced from observable activities in the current economy. This creates an 'uneconomic economics', where models explain relationships in blackboard rather than real-life markets.

In April 2011, Anthony Byrt was living in Berlin and building a career as a critic, writing about the world of contemporary art for magazines like frieze and Artforum International. Then one day his world turned upside down and Byrt, his wife and their new-born son suddenly found themselves booked on a one-way trip home to New Zealand. This Model World is a portrait of what Byrt found when he came back. Built around hundreds of hours spent in galleries, artists' studios and on the road from Brisbane to Detroit to Venice, this is a deeply personal journey into the contemporary New Zealand art world and the global world it inhabits. It's a book about major figures like Yvonne Todd, Shane Cotton, Billy Apple, Peter Robinson, Judy Millar and Simon Denny, and emerging artists such as Luke Willis Thompson, Shannon Te Ao and Ruth Buchanan. It's about severed heads and failed cities; about bright young stars and old men with a final point to prove; about looking for God and finding Edward Snowden; and about what it means to investigate the boundary where our bodies hit the world. This Model World – a riveting first-person account of one author's travels to the edge of contemporary art.

This book describes the radical shift in the study of economic science; where arguing with words was replaced by reasoning with mathematical models.

In April 2011, Anthony Byrt was living in Berlin and building a career as a critic, writing about contemporary art for magazines like frieze and Artforum International. Then one day his world turned upside down. A baby boy, two weeks in intensive care, and Byrt, his wife and new-born son suddenly found themselves booked on a one-way trip home to New Zealand. This Model World is a portrait of what Byrt found when he came back. Built around hundreds of hours spent in galleries, artists’ studios and on the road from Brisbane to Detroit to Venice, this is a deeply personal journey through the contemporary New Zealand art world. It’s a book about major figures like Yvonne Todd, Shane Cotton, Billy Apple, Peter Robinson, Judy Millar and Simon Denny, and emerging artists such as Luke Willis Thompson, Shannon Te Ao and Ruth Buchanan. It’s about severed heads and failed cities; about hot young things and old men with a final point to prove; about looking for God and finding Edward Snowden; and it’s about what it means to investigate the boundary where our bodies hit the world.

This book offers many helpful techniques for creating German armored vehicles from the World War II era. Covers numerous aspects of superdetailing models: weathering, airbrushing, creating figures and dioramas, and much more! By Carl McLaughlin.