Palmy dating days

Alexandra Jacobs does the "Palmy Days" column observing on Los Angeles life for the New York Observer. This week, she writes about the practical differences between dating here and in New York, quotes Amy Alkon a bit, and reassures her N.Y. audience that the L.A. scene is of course inferior.

Welcome to romance, L.A. style, where the men are passive and the women are shallow; where prospects routinely tell you to "IMDb them" (referring to the Internet Movie Database, which lists people’s production credits); and where the perils and payoffs of those increasingly popular online personals are thrown into particularly stark relief.

There's also this passage that should chill the newspaper types among us:

"I find that you can talk about more things outside of yourself with New York women," said a 35-year-old screenwriter who moved from the Upper West Side to the Miracle Mile. "You can talk about the newspaper. Here, it doesn’t seem like anybody reads it. I was at a party one time and I made a comment about something I’d read in the paper, and a woman turned to me and said, ‘Did you just move out here?’ And I said yes. And she said, ‘You won’t be reading the paper much longer.’ That really shocked me.