The Score

On the Subject of Leadership · Aug 10, 2026 · 8m

The second essay in the Prior Obligations series, released as articles in audio format, follows a number from birth to dashboard. When a felt condition becomes a score out of one hundred, it acquires an owner, a target, and a budget — everything except a cure — and the question of which way its correlations actually run turns out to matter more than the score itself.

In This Article:

A score is never merely descriptive; the moment it exists it acquires the apparatus of institutional life, and the apparatus acquires an interest in the condition's persistence.

When a measure becomes a target it…