Heartbreaker
A prolific con artist, decades of grift, and a trail of shattered relationships.
Online Dating
How Scorned Women and a Casanova Cop Caught L.A.’s ‘Dine-and-Dash Dater’
Paul Gonzales scammed his online dates into buying him expensive dinners. Then they made him pay.
Fiction: "Other Names"
Painful memories and strange reactions plague a man's series of online dates.
Dirty John
A con artist terrorizes a California family.
Mr. (Swipe) Right?
After a year of tumult and scandal at Tinder, ousted founder Sean Rad is back in charge. Now can he — and his company — grow up?
The Economics of Serial Dating: A Case Study
What one woman spends in a year.
Inside Match.com
A look at the dating site's new algorithm.
Codenamed “Synapse”, the Match algorithm uses a variety of factors to suggest possible mates. While taking into account a user’s stated preferences, such as desired age range, hair colour and body type, it also learns from their actions on the site. So, if a woman says she doesn’t want to date anyone older than 26, but often looks at profiles of thirty-somethings, Match will know she is in fact open to meeting older men. Synapse also uses “triangulation”. That is, the algorithm looks at the behaviour of similar users and factors in that information, too.
Looking for Someone
Inside the world of online dating:
If the dating sites had a mixer, you might find OK Cupid by the bar, muttering factoids and jokes, and Match.com in the middle of the room, conspicuously dropping everyone’s first names into his sentences. The clean-shaven gentleman on the couch, with the excellent posture, the pastel golf shirt, and that strangely chaste yet fiery look in his eye? That would be eHarmony.
