Not Reading the Comments with Maureen Dowd

Fail Better with David Duchovny

Grace Cohen-Chen

Society & Culture

4.6 • 534 Ratings

🗓️ 20 May 2025

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The journalist Maureen Dowd has many notches in her belt, from feats like winning a Pulitzer Prize and writing pivotal profiles on some of the world’s most powerful people. She shone light on Elon Musk before DOGE and Uma Thurman’s emotional struggle with Quentin Tarantino, all of which is captured in her latest book, Notorious. Even for her, though, the process of writing remains fickle. Both Maureen and I want our writing to place readers in conversation with the greats who came before us, and whether we succeed is always up for interpretation. We never stop trying, though — and only occasionally read the comments. We also commune over a shared value of education once Maureen tells me I was the reason she decided to pursue graduate school. Follow me on Instagram at @davidduchovny. Stay up to date with Lemonada on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at @LemonadaMedia. Joining Lemonada Premium is a great way to support our shows and get bonus content. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. For a list of current sponsors and discount codes for this and every other Lemonada show, go to lemonadamedia.com/sponsors. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's morning in New York.
0:02.8	Oh, God.
0:06.2	Hey, everybody.
0:07.3	I'm Mandy Patinkin.
0:08.7	And I'm Catherine Grady.
0:09.8	And we have a new podcast.
0:11.7	It's called Don't Listen to Us.
0:14.1	Many of you've asked for our advice.
0:16.1	Tell me, what is wrong with you people?
0:19.2	Don't listen to us.
0:20.3	Our Take It or Leave a Device show every Wednesday out now.
0:24.7	A Lemonada Media Original.
0:36.1	I'm David Dukovny, and this is Fail Better, a show where failure, not success, shapes who we are.
0:43.3	Maureen Dowd is an author as well as a columnist for the New York Times, where she's been since 1983.
0:49.0	She started at the paper as a Metro reporter, and before that, she reported on various topics for other papers. She describes
0:55.4	the role of a news reporter as a hard one to fill, since she's had to approach subjects who'd
0:59.7	just gone through violence and other horrors. We talk about how she coached herself through doing
1:04.4	that work and how she eventually found her voice. You may know Maureen for her writing on Monica
1:09.9	Lewinsky and the subsequent backlash to
1:12.2	it starting in 1998.
1:13.7	It was actually for that commentary that she won a Pulitzer Prize the following year.
1:19.0	Maureen has continued writing and her new book, Notorious, brings together some of the most
	...

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