Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

First: When the Routine Bites Hard/And Ambitions Are Low: Damhnait Doyle: Love Will Tear Us Apart:

Second: Every Living Thing/Pushed into the Ring: Metric: Stadium Love:

This last courtesy of Cosma Shalizi of Carnegie Mellon, who comments:

Every Living Thing, Pushed into the Ring: DeLong asks for the best response to "My City Was Gone", itself a response to "Mountains beyond Mountains". Since the content of the game has clearly moved from "sprawl" to "one-upmanship", I claim that the best response is in fact "Stadium Love". I actually prefer the official video, but concert footage seems to be an implicit rule of the game. Had the conversation not strayed, "Nothing but Flowers", or "The Big Country" would have been admissible. (I am vexed by the fact that I cannot instantly call up high-quality video recordings of these songs performed when first released, several decades ago. Where's my jetpack Logic named Joe?)

It's not clear to me what this sequence of best-responses is converging to, or if it is converging at all...