Early life and career

Dowd was born the youngest of five children in Washington, D.C. and is of Irish ancestry. Her mother, Margaret "Peggy" (Meenehan), was a housewife, and her father, Mike Dowd, worked as a Washington, D.C. police inspector. Dowd graduated from Immaculata High School in 1969. She received a B.A. in English in 1973 from The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

Dowd began her career in 1974 as an editorial assistant for the Washington Star, where she later became a sports columnist, metropolitan reporter, and feature writer. When the newspaper closed in 1981, she went to work at Time. In 1983, she joined The New York Times, initially as a metropolitan reporter. She began serving as correspondent in the Times Washington bureau in 1986.

In 1991, Dowd received a Breakthrough Award from Columbia University. In 1992, she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for national reporting, and in 1994 she won a Matrix Award from New York Women in Communications.

New York Times columnist, 1995-present

Dowd became a columnist on The New York Times Op-Ed page in 1995, replacing Anna Quindlen, who left to become a full-time novelist. Dowd was named a Woman of the Year by Glamour magazine in 1996, and won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize, for distinguished commentary. She won The Damon Runyon Award for outstanding contributions to journalism in 2000, and became the first Mary Alice Davis Lectureship speaker (sponsored by the School of Journalism and the Center for American History) at The University of Texas at Austin in 2005. In 2010, Dowd was ranked #43 on The Daily Telegraph's list of the 100 most influential liberals in America; in 2007, she was ranked #37 on the same list.

Dowd's columns have been described as letters to her mother, whom friends credit as "the source, the fountain of Maureen’s humor and her Irish sensibilities and her intellectual take." Dowd herself has said, "she is in my head in the sense that I want to inform and amuse the reader." Dowd's columns are distinguished by an acerbic, often polemical writing style. Her columns often display a critical and irreverent attitude towards powerful, mostly political, figures such as former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Dowd also tends to refer to her subjects by nicknames. For example, she has often referred to Bush as "W." and former Vice President Dick Cheney as "Big Time." She has called President Barack Obama "Spock" and "Barry." Dowd's interest in candidates' personalities earned her criticism early in her career: "She focuses too much on the person but not enough on policy."

Dowd, who perceives her columns to be an exploration of politics, Hollywood, and gender related topics, often uses popular culture to support and metaphorically enhance her political commentary. In a Times video debate, she said of the North Korean government: "...you could look at a movie like Mean Girls and figure out the way these North Koreans are reacting; you know it's like high school girls with nuclear weapons—they just want some attention from us, you know?"

Dowd's columns have also been described as often being political cartoons that capture a caricatured view of the current political landscape with precision and exaggeration. For example, in the run-up to the 2000 presidential election Dowd wrote that Democratic candidate "Al Gore is so feminized and diversified and ecologically correct that he's practically lactating," while referring to the Democratic party as the "mommy party." In a Fresh Dialogues interview years later she said, "I was just teasing him a little bit because he was so earnest and he could be a little righteous and self important. That’s not always the most effective way to communicate your ideas, even if the ideas themselves are right. I mean, certainly his ideas were right but he himself was - sometimes - a pompous messenger for them."

Talking Points Memo blogger "thejoshuablog" found a paragraph in Dowd's May 17, 2009 Times column that was similar to one in a May 14 blog post by TPM editor Josh Marshall, and accused her of plagiarism. Dowd said the wording was "a line" told to her by a friend, and that she had never read the blog. Since then, Dowd's column has been updated with a correction that references Marshall. Times public editor Clark Hoyt said, "...readers have a right to expect that even if an opinion columnist like Dowd tosses around ideas with a friend, her column will be her own words. If the words are not hers, she must give credit."

In January 2014, Dowd said she ate about one-quarter of a cannabis-infused chocolate bar, while touring the legalized recreational cannabis industry. She said she was later told she should have only eaten one-sixteenth, which was not in the instructions on the label. She then described her negative experiences with legal cannabis in a June 3, 2014, New York Times op-ed. In September 2014, Dowd followed up on this story with another New York Times op-ed, this time describing a discussion of using consumable cannabis with her "marijuana Miyagi" Willie Nelson.

On March 4, 2014, Dowd published a column about the dominance of men in the film industry; in it she quoted Amy Pascal, co-chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment. According to Buzzfeed, “leaked emails from Sony” suggested that Dowd had promised to share the column with Pascal’s husband, former Times reporter Bernard Weinraub prior to the column's publication. Buzzfeed said the column “painted Pascal in such a good light that she engaged in a round of mutual adulation with Dowd over email after its publication.” Both Dowd and Weinraub have denied that Weinraub ever received the column. On December 12, 2014 Times public editor Margaret Sullivan concluded, “While the tone of the email exchanges is undeniably gushy, I don’t think Ms. Dowd did anything unethical here.” In August 2014, it was announced that Dowd would become a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine. Her first article under the new arrangement was published more than a year later.

On May 2, 2015, Dowd published a column in the NY Times about her niece, Tara who had a stroke at age 41, caused by an arterial dissection in her brain. Prior to the stroke, Tara had been a very active athlete. The first neurologist who saw Tara told her to cut back on physical activity, but a second neurologist, Dr. Louis R. Caplan, a Harvard neurologist, disagreed with the first neurologist and told her to return to exercise, which she did safely. In the article, Dr. Caplan suggested that going to the emergency rooms was "dangerous" and compared ERs to "local gas stations" where you should not get your brain, a "Rolls-Royce" serviced. He suggested you go see a neurologist instead of going to the ER. These comments unleashed a firestorm of comments from emergency medicine physicians on social media, who thought that Caplan's comments were poorly informed and reckless, particularly sending the message not to go to the ER when you're having stroke, which directly contradicts recommendations from the American Heart Association to "call 9-1-1" when experiencing signs of stroke. In a related column in the Huffington Post, Dr. David Newman, an ER physician from Mount Sinai, wrote that Dr. Caplan's comments showed "poor insight" and "narrow expertise", claiming that subspecialty medicine as a whole was expensive and often unnecessarily invasive.

Personal life

Dowd formerly dated Aaron Sorkin, the creator and producer of The West Wing. She also had "a brief fling" with the actor Michael Douglas and is an ex-companion of her fellow Times columnist John Tierney.

Bibliography

• Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk. G. P. Putnam's Sons. 2004. ISBN 0-425-20276-3.
• Are Men Necessary? When Sexes Collide. Putnam. 2005. ISBN 0-7553-1550-2.

Charities

Maureen Dowd supports the following charitable cause: Health Care.

[ Source: Wikipedia ]