SAT to drop essay requirement as part of overhaul

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16. Writing? What's that?

Get over it, grandpa.

The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation



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The Gettysburg Address as a Powerpoint

Thirteen years ago, Peter Norvig, the current director of research at Google, suffered a dark night of the soul. Powerpoint presentations, he felt, ruled everything around him. Sales pitches, mission statements, even (shudder) inspirational speeches: All had been processed and extruded by the harsh, homogenizing gizzard of Microsoft’s leviathan.

So, he wondered, what if the Powerpoint had existed earlier in history? What if Lincoln, for example, had turned to the software in a time of utmost national need—what if, oh my gosh, what if Lincoln had delivered the Gettysburg address as a Powerpoint?

And so the stuff of Internet myth came to be.

In Norvig’s hands, the near-biblical phrase—“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”—becomes (what else?) a chart: