Newsletters Are the New Matchmakers

Last month in Los Angeles, John Fulton reported the following: Cafe Stella has not only reopened—it also might get a pool. Maru needs baristas for its Los Feliz location. The Salkin House, gorgeously restored, has found a buyer. Oh, and a 38-year-old guy who dislikes Los Angeles Police Department helicopters is single and open to dating.Fulton is the publisher of a year-old Substack newsletter called The Eastside Rag, which focuses on the goings-on in a collection of L.A. neighborhoods, including the trendy Silver Lake, the upscale Los Feliz, and the quickly gentrifying Atwater Village and Highland Park. He returns to certain scenes, themes, and characters again and again—celebrity sightings at Canyon Coffee (Echo Park), the sex appeal of the delivery guys at the east-side restaurant Bub and Grandma’s (Glassell Park), sales at the hipster apparel store Mohawk. What he wasn’t expecting, when he began his project, was that he would also become a relationship matchmaker—and that his newsletters featuring personals would become subscriber catnip (his readers now number in the thousands).But when you think about it, the development—call it “hyperlocal dating”—is sort of obvious. It seems that every few weeks, someone predicts the death of dating apps. The apps won’t disappear anytime soon, though they may get worse, what with their growing reliance on AI, which threatens to further alienate users from anything resembling authentic human experience. More and more people may be trying to swear off machine-made love matches, but when they do, the question becomes: How in the world to meet someone?[Read: The doomed dream of an AI matchmaker]Just do it IRL, people might say, but that can be harder than it sounds. With far more people staying home than in previous generations, those seeking romance face tough odds if they’re hoping to simply walk out the door and stumble into a meet-cute. Singles mixers and speed-dating events have been around for decades, but at best they fee