Four Score and Seven Slides.

“This dialect is notable for its use of bullet points, objet trouve clip art, and gratuitously intrusive animation. Speakers are commonly found in business, academia, government, and the officer corps of the military. While some TP speakers are bilingual in English, many of them see complete paragraphs as only so much babble.”

The Atlantic‘s Robinson Meyer delves into the conversion of classic texts into “Terrible Powerpoint”, including Paul’s letter to the Corinthians and the Gettysburg Address. “It is so that these TP speakers might be saved that I have translated Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians into their native tongue.”

The Last Full Measure.

“The American republic was, in 1863, a dangerously isolated democratic flower in a garden full of aristocratic weeds, and if the Civil War succeeded in sundering the United States into two separate pieces, it would be the final confirmation that democracies were unstable and unworkable pipe dreams. ‘The central idea pervading this struggle,’ Lincoln said in 1861, ‘is the necessity…of proving that popular government is not an absurdity,’ for ‘if we fail it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves.’ That ‘proving’ was what Gettysburg – and its roll of dead – provided.”

Seven score and ten years ago today, the Battle of Gettysburg began. “[F]rom these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion –that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

An Abe, Honest.

“‘Now, if Gen. Meade can complete his work so gloriously prosecuted thus far, by the litteral or substantial destruction of Lee’s army,’ Lincoln wrote, ‘the rebellion will be over.” Trevor Plante, a researcher for the Discovery Channel, discovers a lost handwritten note penned by Lincoln after Gettysburg in the National Archives. Meade did not complete his work, of course — like McClellan before him, he remained overcautious with the Army of the Potomac, prompting Lincoln’s wrath in an unsent letter dated a week after the discovered note: “My dear general, I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee’s escape. He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes, have ended the war. As it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely. Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasureably because of it.”