A very EU coup: Martin Selmayr’s astonishing power grab | The Spectator
Martin Selmayr has always dreamed of being known beyond the Brussels bubble. His wish has now been granted, albeit in not quite the way he might have hoped. It has arrived in the form of a brilliantly executed coup that has handed this 47-year-old German bureaucrat near-total control of the EU machine.

The Man Who Knew Too Little – The New York Times
Right after the election, Erik Hagerman decided he’d take a break from reading about the hoopla of politics. Donald Trump’s victory shook him. Badly. And so Mr. Hagerman developed his own eccentric experiment, one that was part silent protest, part coping mechanism, part extreme self-care plan. He swore that he would avoid learning about anything that happened to America after Nov. 8, 2016. “It was draconian and complete,” he said. “It’s not like I wanted to just steer away from Trump or shift the conversation. It was like I was a vampire and any photon of Trump would turn me to dust.” It was just going to be for a few days. But he is now more than a year into knowing almost nothing about American politics. He has managed to become shockingly uninformed during one of the most eventful chapters in modern American history. He is as ignorant as a contemporary citizen could ever hope to be.

How Lies Spread Online – The New York Times
For all categories of information — politics, entertainment, business and so on — we found that false stories spread significantly farther, faster and more broadly than did true ones. Falsehoods were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted, even when controlling for the age of the original tweeter’s account, its activity level, the number of its followers and followees, and whether Twitter had verified the account as genuine. These effects were more pronounced for false political stories than for any other type of false news.

Huge MIT Study of ‘Fake News’: Falsehoods Win on Twitter – The Atlantic
Ik kan niet zeggen dat ik verbaasd ben. "Falsehoods almost always beat out the truth on Twitter, penetrating further, faster, and deeper into the social network than accurate information."

Photobook Captures Diverse Beauty of 100 Different Types of Chickens
If you were asked to name the most beautiful species of bird in the world, it’s unlikely that “chicken” would be your first answer. However, Italian photographers Moreno Monti and Matteo Tranchellini believe chickens are underrated. The two began a portrait project called Chic!ken to show the world just how beautiful these humble farm birds really are. Today, with over 200 stunning portraits showcasing 100 different types of chickens, the pair decided to combine the collection into a hardback photobook.