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Hello and welcome to the Double X podcast for Thursday, November 29th, the Nobody's Business Edition.

I'm Hannah Rosen, editor at Double X, calling you from the DC studios, and I am joined in New York today by Alison Benedict, another double X editor. Hi, Allison. Hey, Hannah. And also Noreen Malone of the New Republic. Hi, Noreen. Hey, Hannah. Our three topics today are first, how Martha Stewart has become cool again, or more precisely, as the New York Times called her, how she's become the patron saint

for entrepreneurial hipsters. Our second topic is Rihanna and Chris Brown. Do we care that one of our

biggest pop icons is proud to be back with the man who beat her? And third is Fox's story,

The War on Men, the quite popular story on the site, which claims that we women are to blame for the lack of marriageable men in this country. So let's start with Martha Stewart, who was called, awesomely, the Jesus of the Craft World in one reason story. Martha Stewart's company is failing. It continues to fail. She went to jail for lying about a stock trade. And yet all of that has served just to make her really hip. In fact, someone from the Brooklyn Cafe Urban Rustic said that her doing some time in the joint, which is a funny way to think about Martha Stewart, has helped cement her iconic image. She has now been

reincarnated as an inspiration to hipster perfectionists everywhere, people who pickle and can and make

t-shirts out of vintage sheets. Once I thought about it, it kind of made sense to me, but Noreen,

let me ask you. You are a person who has followed Martha Stewart, as you confessed on email.

I'm obsessed with Martha Stewart. Okay, who's obsessed? I didn't want to use that word because we

casually throw that world around all the time. So why do you think that she's been suddenly

revived as an icon in this way? Well, I don't know if it's that sudden, first of all,

but I do think there are a few

obvious reasons and a few less obvious reasons. One is just that crafting in general and sort of

old-fashioned homemaker arts have, as has been well documented in the New York Times and plenty of

other places, probably in the pages of Slate as well, have had a real resurgence. And Martha is just

very, very good at doing that kind of thing and at laying out the steps and coming up with bizarre projects.

I actually, in preparation for this segment, went back and looked at an assessment that your husband wrote about 10 years ago of Martha Stewart.

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