From WNYC in New York, this is on the media. I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Lightstone. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. What does it really mean?

Happy and new are, after all, relative terms. Their meanings hang on the context in which they're invoked.

And year?

Well, its actual meaning is fixed, but it's also used as an emotional marker.

I was there for a week, but it felt like a year.

I can't believe it's been a year.

That was just a year ago?

It can mean the blink of an eye or eternity.

On this show, we've put together a couple of recent pieces

and a vintage one to consider some of the feelings stirred up in 2017

and how to manage them in the year to come.

It was just a year ago, right before the inauguration, in fact, I was in the editorial meeting

and even through the speakerphone connecting me with the team in New York, the staff

detected in my voice a slight suicidal despondency. Hey, Bob, one helpful producer asked, have you ever read

Hope in the Dark? Hope in the Dark by the activist and philosopher Rebecca Solnit is a kind of manual

of hope, laying out the many times citizen action has averted disaster and changed the course of history.

It's a book that has no patience with despair, and though it was written in 2004,

it's lately been flying off the shelves.

Wouldn't it be swell, Bob, for you to speak to Rebecca Solnit?

So, I did. Can you start off, Bob, for you to speak to Rebecca Solnit. So, I did.

Can you start off, please, by reading from the beginning of your first essay,

...