Vol. I · New York
NXNY
Nexus New York · An occasional magazine of essays
◆Dept. of Measurement◆
The Two Sizes of a Bank
One New York institution reports trillions held for clients, while a regulator counts billions on its bank's own balance sheet. Both figures are true. They answer different questions.
◆Dept. of Arbitrage◆
A Bot on Wall Street
A New York investor asks a script to borrow against a portfolio and buy a bond fund. The machine can keep the accounts beautifully. It cannot make the spread positive or persuade the lender to wait.
◆Annals of Commitment◆
The Weak Link
A man who wants to know whether she would say yes is asking a question the research has never answered, using an instrument that has been measured going wrong in exactly the direction he fears. Here is what the cues can actually tell him, what the folklore cannot, and why the reliable method is the one nobody wants to use.
◆Dept. of Dissent◆
The Value of the Alternative
This magazine argued elsewhere in this issue that the queue of suitors is a mailbox rather than a strategy. The argument was too quick. There is an older law and a better-validated model that between them make wanting alternatives the most rational thing a person in that position can do—and that explain, without recourse to anybody’s vanity, why the process comes to rest at two.
◆Annals of Selection◆
The Shortlist
More than four-fifths of the opening messages are sent by men, so a woman on the market does hold a queue. Whether holding one is a strategy is a different question, and the evidence answers it differently. What abundance produces is not a longer list but a higher bar—and nothing in that process stops at two.
◆Annals of Courtship◆
The Kindest Refusal
The phrase insists that a man was put somewhere, and that he arrived by waiting too long. The evidence supports neither claim. What it supports is stranger: friendship is the main road into romance, and the thing that fails along it is a courtship nobody ever declared.
◆Annals of Rivalry◆
The Better Man
New York’s favorite love story seats one woman between two men and calls her choice sovereign. The mechanism underneath it is real and worth about six per cent. The expectation that a man enter the contest is enforced, almost entirely, by people who are not her.
◆Annals of Rejection◆
The Cost of the Chase
In American romance, to be burned is to turn disappointment into an injury story. The hurt may be perfectly real. The accusation hidden inside it is a separate matter.
◆Annals of Attraction◆
The Unanswered Message
Folk wisdom holds that a woman wants the man who does not write back, and wants him more if she suspects there are others. There is real science underneath the belief, and it is smaller and stranger than the belief requires: three separate literatures produce the same curve, and the advice has read only its left half.
◆Dept. of Measurement◆
The Second Number
Seven company reports arrive in the same week, and every headline figure in them is arithmetically correct. Not one is enough to act on. For a New York reader of the market, the habit that matters is finding the number the first number left out.
◆Annals of Exchange◆
The Color of the Pen
A life is not one relationship but a set of them, running on incompatible terms, and almost nobody chooses which terms apply. Sociology has spent thirty years running controlled experiments on giving and receiving. Read against them, wanting somebody turns out to be less a matter of what is on offer than of the form in which it arrives.
◆Annals of Ambition◆
Borrowed Fire
Desire is widely credited with powering ambition, and the credit can be checked. The science finds no current running from attraction to revenue—but it does find a mechanism, a rent, and a bill that tends to arrive at somebody else's desk. An inquiry into what tension and conversation actually do to work in New York.
◆Annals of Amusement◆
The Uses of Laughter
The evidence says the joke is a working instrument—of status at the office, of repair at home, of selection in courtship—issued to everyone and licensed unevenly, by sex and by city. An audit of laughter in New York.
◆Annals of Ascent◆
Anyone Who Plays Squash
An investment banker reads a résumé, sees a word he likes, and ranks the candidate first. There is a large and careful literature explaining why he did that. There is a smaller and more uncomfortable one explaining why learning to say the word will not be enough.
◆Annals of Attraction◆
The Measure of a Man
Science can say, with some precision, which men are wanted, and roughly why. It still cannot say who will be wanted by whom—and that failure turns out to be the most useful finding of all. A study of desire in New York.
◆Comment◆
A Magazine for New York
Introducing NXNY — what an occasional magazine owes its readers, and what it intends to take its time about.