Girls aren’t daring enough until they learn how to play with jacks and skip rope, or at least that’s what we gathered from watching this morning’s Today Show. Andrea Buchanan and Miriam Peskowitz, authors of The Daring Book for Girls (a companion to The Daring Book for Boys), talk with Meredith Vieira about what a daring girl is, and apparently it involves a lot of retro activities their moms used to play. “A daring girl wakes up every morning, and says, ‘this is an opportunity for fun and adventure,’” says the authors “She is brave…and she sticks up for herself, or sticks up for others.” (Did these three miss the boat on Girl Power, or what?) But the clip also talks about how girls no longer know how to play as children. Instead they are immersed in a world of cell phones and computers, and “need to learn not to grow up so quickly.” Since it’s Halloween, the authors explain how to tell a ghost story.

Somebody please introduce these people to a T-Mobile Sidekick. Watch the clip here, and listen to the authors on WNYC’s Leonard Lopate Show below.

Now that her cover has been blown and her mug is all over the place, former CIA spy Valerie Plame Wilson went on The Daily Show last night to talk about her book, Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House. Plame and Jon Stewart discuss Robert Novak, the White House, Niger, and parts of the book the CIA redacted, including a piece about breast feeding.Find out more about the book at Simon & Schuster.

Jung Chang, author of the bestselling Wild Swans, talks with BBC Radio 4’s Today show about media censorship and the lack of freedom of the press in her native China, despite the country’s economic growth and opening of its society. Chang’s biography of Chinese leader Mao Zedong, Mao: The Unknown Story, is still banned in China, but Chang is best known around the world for Wild Swans, a story about Chang, her mother, and her grandmother detailing their lives in 20th-century China.

Check out Chang’s BBC interview here (Real Player required).

When it comes to Japan’s contribution to modern arts, there’s nothing more Japanese than manga. What most Americans see as comic books, manga is more of an art form. In this month’s Wired, Daniel H. Pink reports that manga sales in the United States have tripled in the last four years, and it has also become popular in Europe. (Still don’t see why manga is popular? Just turn on your TV to any network showing cartoons, and chances are it’ll be an anime program that was spawn from manga, like Naruto and Dragon Ball). But despite the growing popularity on our shores, the magazine also finds that manga readership is falling in Japan. The article explores the complexity of the genre, and where it’s headed.

Check out the article here, which includes additional online features, like a quick guide to manga.

Imagine living life as one person, and then being told you aren’t exactly who you think you are. That’s what Bliss Broyard endured, and she discusses the experience and her book One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life—A Story of Race and Family Secrets with WNYC’s Brian Lehrer. Before he passed away from cancer, the author’s father, Anatole, revealed to his children of his true racial identity, that he is black. (Anatole Broyard, as many may know, was a book critic at the New York Times and a columnist at the New York Times Book Review.) In the book Broyard writes about what came after her relevation, and “chronicles her own evolution from privileged WASP to a woman of mixed-race ancestry.”

You can listen to the interview above, and read a chapter of the book here.

Roz Chast, a cartoonist for The New Yorker, and Steve Martin teamed up to put together a children’s alphabet book that, from the sounds of their interview this morning on NPR’s Morning Edition, should be a good time for parents as well as children.

“The Alphabet from A to Y with Bonus Letter Z” is a book of rhyming couplets–one for each letter of course–written by Martin and playfully illustrated by Chast. M, for example, features a crazed-looking floating fat kid with the couplet “Maniacal Marvin munched many a macaroon, Making his middle a mini hot air balloon.”

You can read more of the couplets, including a couple that didn’t make it in, see illustrations and listen to the interview here.

Bad leadership in Washington made retired four-star General Wesley Clark write a book called A Time To Lead: For Duty, Honor And Country and though he claims it’s not a candidate’s memoir, it sounds like it sure reads like one. Stephen Colbert recently had Clark on to discuss the book, hence the video clip above. Unfortunately, Clark doesn’t get a lot of time to talk about the book, but at least he’s got a good sense of humor. Many more in-depth interviews about the book and Clark’s ideas are available online at Clark’s Web site, SecuringAmerica.com.