When I think of bringing in the new year on a high note, I think of one of the most upbeat and inspiring people I’ve ever talked to. That’s Norman Lear who will turn 100 in July. Lear says that one reason he’s still around is that he spends so much time laughing.

Covid is raging again. The virus has similarities to another serious health problem. This one is caused by a tick bite and it can wreak havoc on your life. Just ask Ross Douthat, an Op-Ed columnist for the New York Times who fought a 5-year battle with Lyme disease.

Ricki Lake’s career took off when she was 19 and starred as Tracy Turnblad in John waters’ cult film Hairspray. Now she makes documentaries about women’s health. Her latest one is called The Business of Birth Control. We talk about the art of reinventing yourself and all the phases of Ricki Lake’s life in the new episode of “Now What?”

She’s most famous for her role as Carmela Soprano, the long-suffering wife of mob boss Tony Soprano played by Jim Gandolfini. Now, the long-running TV series has found a new audience, young people who can’t get enough of the New Jersey crime family and its gangland antics. Falco has moved on to other roles.

He’s a staff writer for the New Yorker and a Pulitzer-prize winner for his book The Looming Tower about Al-Qaeda and 9/11. Lawrence Wright also wrote an expose of Scientology called Going Clear. His latest book, The Plague Year, looks at pandemics and takes a deep dive into how long we may have to live in a world with Covid-19.

She’s a celebrated playwright who’s had her share of health challenges. Sarah Ruhl is the author of Eurydice which will have its premiere as an opera at Lincoln Center in November. Ruhl is also a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist for her plays The Clean House and In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play).

I first met Neil deGrasse Tyson at a bug eating event at the Museum of Natural History when he was munching on a fried tarantula. You may remember him as the host of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. That was the continuation of a television series that had originally starred Carl Sagan, another well-known astrophysicist.

Georgina Pazcoguin started taking ballet lessons when she was 4 and when she was a teenager she was accepted into the School of American Ballet, not an easy feat. Georgina wound up becoming a soloist with the NYC Ballet, butting heads with long-time Director Peter Martins. We talk about the tightly-wound world of ballet, dancing nude in Oh! Calcutta! and Georgina’s tell-all book Swan Dive.

Ben Rhodes was 29 when he went to work for Barack Obama in the White House. In his role as Deputy National Security Advisor, Rhodes helped to negotiate the Iran nuclear deal and the opening to Cuba, only to see Donald Trump tear down those policies. Then Rhodes traveled to Hungary, Russia and China to look at governments that promote nationalism.

Kloots may be the most famous Covid widow in the world and it’s not a distinction that anyone wants to have. Kloots’ husband, former Broadway star Nick Cordero, died of the effects of the virus last year at the age of 41. Kloots is also a celebrity fitness trainer and workout guru. She wrote a memoir about losing Nick, raising their young son Elvis and how to move on called Live Your Life.

Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney likes to take on controversial subjects. In Catching Hell, Gibney looks at what happened when a fan tried to catch a foul ball in a Cubs game in 2003. The Scientology community came after Gibney after he released his film Going Clear. And then there was the portrait of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes in The Inventor and her claims to have pioneered a revolutionary new way to test blood.

So far she’s written 17 novels including her breakout book We Need to Talk About Kevin. When she’s not sitting at her desk thinking up stories to terrify us like the one about Kevin committing mass murder at his high school, you can probably find Shriver on the tennis court or saying something politically incorrect or in her kitchen mixing up a mean rhubarb cream pie.

Anxiety seems to be running rampant through our lives these days. Covid hasn’t helped. The political situation is chaotic. And everywhere we turn we’re bombarded with social media and sensory input of all kinds. So if you find yourselves pulling your hair out like us, you’re not alone. Help is on the way. Dr. Jud Brewer has our backs.

One day in 1970, the Village Voice sent writer Vivian Gornick to cover a women’s-liberation gathering on Bleecker Street. She came back a radical feminist. And it was her articles in the Voice that helped spread the word about the burgeoning gender equality movement that came to be known as second wave feminism.