Here's our not-quite-automated guide to New York's feature stories. In "Meet. Mate. Multiply," Rachel Lehmann-Haupt examines an interesting wrinkle in yuppie dating patterns: people who choose to rocket through that dating part, going from meeting to family in just a year or two.

Keywords: Singles; dating; marriage; kids; fertility specialist; JDate; Connecticut.

The details: As middle age looms, some single New Yorkers decide to take care of the whole settling-down thing in one fell swoop. We meet several of the resultant families — Scott and Erica, for example, who turned into Scott and Erica and Coco and Rubyrose in a mere year and four months — in their homes: "a one-bedroom apartment on Upper West Side," "a bright Tribeca loft," "an East Village walk-up," "the house they are living in temporarily in Connecticut."

Crucial quote: "'Yeah, meeting Lars, getting married, having a kid,' says Sophie. 'The pace of it all. I was an overachiever in college, and I've achieved all this in fifteen months.'"

Takeaway: When the family-obsessed national culture meets the career-focused New York lifestyle, a weird vortex is created wherein people both postpone and rush through settling down. Which is not to say those people are any crazier than the rest of us.

Read the full article here — and the full issue here.