Is this a sentiment score?

No. It is a structured composite of three measurable signals: criticality, novelty, and noise. We never run our briefs through a sentiment model — sentiment scoring of news headlines is notoriously biased toward dramatic vocabulary, which is exactly what we are trying to filter out.

Why does the score rarely hit 10?

Because a 10 means the day has produced an objectively major event with low noise and high novelty. Most days don't qualify. The dial would lose its information value if it sat at 9 every Tuesday.

How is this different from the Bullshit Index?

The Bullshit Index measures the noise level of how stories are told. How Mad Should I Be? measures whether the day's actual events warrant the energy you are spending on them. The Bullshit Index is an input to the meter; they are related but they answer different questions.

Can I sort the brief by this meter?

The meter is a daily aggregate, not a per-story sort. The brief is ranked by criticality and corroboration; the meter contextualizes the brief as a whole.

What is the How Mad Should I Be? meter?

How Mad Should I Be? is a daily 1-to-10 score that exists because the news has been louder than it has been important for most of the last decade, and the gap between how the day reads and how it feels has been growing. The meter closes that gap.

The score is derived from three signals at the room level. First, criticality — the average importance score of the day's top stories across all categories, on a 1-to-10 scale. Second, the share of those stories that are genuinely new (a development, a ruling, a number) versus reactive (a quote, a thread, a clip). Third, the day's median Bullshit Index — high noise pulls the meter down because most of what is making the news feel urgent is theater.

The result is one number plus a one-line caption. A 3 with 'genuinely a slow news day' means the wires were quiet and the loud takes were doing most of the work. A 7 with 'a few real moves, mostly priced in' means substantive news happened but most of it was anticipated. A 9 is rare and usually means the day broke an actual story that will be in the history books — an election, a war, a constitutional ruling, a major crash.

We publish it because most readers calibrate against the volume they hear, and the volume is no longer a good calibrator. Cable chyrons, push notifications, and group chats all dial to ten regardless of the day. How Mad Should I Be? is a counterweight: a single dial that, on average, will sit between three and five, because most days are average days, and your nervous system deserves to know that.

FAQ