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.

Imagine a world without human beings.

The tag line to the latest Omega Man remake? Hardly. Rather, its the premise of journalist Alan Weisman’s newest book, The World Without Us, an examination of what might happen if the strain of humanity was taken off the earth. For instance, in days’ time, the pumps that keep our subways dry would fail, flood, and begin eroding underground construction. In a year’s time, millions more birds will exist in a world without airplanes. In twenty years’ time, the steel beams that support New York’s East Side would buckle and break. As Lexington Ave. collapses, it would become a river. Our plastic would exist long after everything else. Our radio signals, however broken, would be emitted forever.

The book is full of juicy factoids like those, but Weisman also takes a look at parts of the world untouched by human hands — Chernobyl, the Korean Demilitarized Zone, the old-growth forests of Poland — and uses those environments to further inform his post-apocalyptic vision.

But Jon Stewart makes it all funny. Watch the Daily Show interview.

Jed Babbin. With a name like that, how could you forget him? He was the George H.W. Bush’s Undersecretary of Defense, and now he’s joined the ranks of people that insist we knew about 9/11 years before it happened, and still failed to take any preventative action. But that’s not even the important part: in his newest book, In the Words of Our Enemies Babbin says we’re still being warned by Iran, North Korea, and terrorist factions across the world. The inside flap informs us that the book tackles such topics as, “What the Islamists themselves are saying about their plans for America–mass murder followed by imposition of Islamic sharia law?”, “How Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez is leading a radical anti-American revolution that aims to organize the world’s oil supplies against America”, and “How many countries have threatened to use nuclear weapons against America (it’s more than you think)”.

So conspiracy theorists rejoice. This will give you fodder for years.

Babbin appeared on the Daily Show several days ago. Watch the full interview here.

ps. Foreword by Newt Gingrich!

“I have to convince the experts,” says Greg Bear on his style of “hard” science fiction — novels based on existing and plausible science. “These are the guys that spend their all their time in labs doing tests. They know when it’s not going to work.” The idea for Bear’s latest work, Quantico, came to him while working alongside the FBI to devise real-life methods for combating terrorism. THAT is how hard Bear is.

But he noticed something, though: Among all these new ideas and new technologies, there was very little addressing domestic terrorism. With echoes of the 2001 Anthrax scare still ringing in his head, he set to work creating a world in which domestic terrorism is the chief fear in America and dangerous pathogens and viruses are being created, both deliberately and inadvertently, in basements all across the country. Bear’s ultimate question is, how do we as a nation combat something so nebulous when we can’t just go in and blow everything all up.

Watch the full interview.

With The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America, Allen Brandt, a professor at the Harvard Medical School, offers up the definitive history of the cigarette, from its inception in the late 19th century to its widespread ban in the late 20th. Thursday night, Brandt sat down with Jon Stewart and argued that cigarettes represent nearly every aspect of America: agriculture, business, pop culture, issues of gender and sexuality, advertising, public relations and so on.

In his book, Brandt documents the knowledge that cigarettes are harmful in great detail, but that there is no sense of shame or acknowledgment on the part of cigarette companies, who still go after what they call “replacement smokers,” kids that they lure in with newly reissued flavored cigarettes and tobacco.

Watch the whole interview, in which Brandt puts forth his theory on how cigarettes have remained popular for over a century.

Bob Shrum, a veteran Democratic political strategist, has been in his words, “at the center of progressive politcs…from Vietnam to Iraq.” He recently came out with a book, No Excuses: Confessions of a Serial Campaigner, in which he writes about his experiences in politics over the past 30 years, during which time he experienced a drastic change in campaigning.

He sat down with Jon Stewart and discussed how in the 70s each candidate had “their people, and if they lost, they went away.” Now, campaigners jump from candidate to candidate in sort of an interview process. “It’s sure easier to run with someone you believe in.” Campaigning, Shrum argues, is more a business now than ever, and that in order to win the candidate needs to go after the best, most experienced campaigners he can get, regardless of previous affiliation.

Watch the interview for an entertaining story about Julie Christie, Warren Beatty and some democrats.

This is how life imitates art: During the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Catholic King James II was deposed, largely without blood, via an elaborate conspiracy that installed his protestant daughter, Mary, and her husband, William Henry of Orange.

As Jon Stewart points out, “That’s King Lear!”

That play was banned for several years after the revolution, and we know this because last night, Stewart sat down to talk to Michael Barone, author of Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Uprising That Inspired America’s Founding Fathers. The book argues that the American Revolution took most of its cues from the Glorious Revolution, some ninety years before. In the interview, Barone discusses the climate from which the Glorious Revolution sprung forth, the parallels in the United States, and how our War for Independence wasn’t such a revolutionary move after all.

Watch the whole interview here.