NextGen Bar Exam MC Questions Only Require Takers To Spot Issues, And Not Apply the Rules

In law schools, generations of students have been taught the IRAC model to answer legal questions. First, students must spot the issue–what legal doctrine do the facts implicate? Second, students must state the rule–what particular legal precedent, statute, or principle governs this conflict? Third, students must then apply the rule to these facts–under a particular legal standard, how should the court rule? Fourth, students must state the conclusion–who wins, the plaintiff or the defendant?

Of course, there are many variations of IRAC, and invariably, many students stop using it rigidly at some point during the second year. But the basic process–applying a rule to particular facts is a cornerstone of legal education.

That background brings me to the NextGen bar exam. I have written about this new formulation of the multistate bar exam, which will launch in some states in 2026. Justice Jay Mitchell of the Alabama Supreme Court already expressed a concern that the National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE) is placing DEI concerns over competence. (Critics contend that the bar exam is racist, and should be eliminated). I have another concern, which may be related–the NCBE seems to be making the exam substantially easier.

The NCBE released a batch of questions to demonstrate how the NextGen exam will function. The multiple choice questions reflect a new approach. Rather than forcing students to memorize particular rules, and then apply them, the new questions only ask students to spot the issue. The thinking is that practicing attorneys do not actually have to memorize particular rules, or even know how to apply them. So long as they can recognize what doctrine is implicated, a quick query on WestLaw, Lexis, and (lord help us) ChatGPT can locate the particular rule, and then the lawyer can figure out how to apply that rule to the facts (or just ask ChatGPT to do it). In short, bar examinees will not have to know the rule, apply the rule, or conclude the case. They only have to spot the issue. Only I, not RAC.

Consider this Criminal Procedure question:

You are a criminal defense lawyer representing a client who has been charged with fentanyl possession. The police found the fentanyl in the guest bedroom of the client's uncle's house when responding to a noise complaint at the house. Before entering the house, the officers knocked on the door. When the uncle answered the door, the officers asked if they could look inside the house, and the uncle agreed. The client did not live in the house and was not there at the time of the search. The client had stayed in the guest bedroom of the house two nights prior to the search. The uncle told the officers that the client was the last person to have slept in that room.

You are considering filing a motion to suppress the fentanyl under the Fourth Amendment.

Which of the following legal topics are the most important for you to research to determine the likelihood of success on a motion to suppress? Select two.

A. Consent search.B. Exigent circumstances.C. Hot pursuit.D. Probable cause.E.Reasonable suspicion.F. Standing.

The correct answer here is A (Consent Search) and F (Standing). Those are the legal topics that are "most important" to research. First, would the Uncle have authority to consent to the search? Second, would the criminal defendant have standing to challenge the Uncle's consent? Now the examinee does not actually have to answer whether the motion to suppress would be granted. Who cares if the Uncle could consent to the search? It doesn't matter if the defendant has standing. The test taker doesn't even have to know the relevant rules for consent searches and standing. All she has to do is spot the issue. I suppose the NCBE thinks that a first-year lawyer can simply enter "consent search" and "standing" into ChatGPT, knowing nothing more, and download the answer. I am not confident anyone can figure out these doctrines on the fly.

Let's try a Property question.

You are representing a client in a dispute with a neighbor. The client owns a single-family home with several acres of surrounding land. Recently, the client noticed that his neighbor had built a fence that extends onto the client's land. The client is unsure when the fence was built because that part of the client's land is obscured by large trees. When the client contacted the neighbor about the fence, the neighbor claimed that she did not know the location of the property line. The client has shown you a recent survey of the property that confirms the encroachment and has asked you whether he has a claim against the neighbor.

Which of the following legal topics are the most important for you to research before advising the client? Select two.

A. Adverse possession.B. Conversion.C. Implied easement.D. License.E. Negligence.F. Trespass.

The answers here are, once again, A (Adverse Possession) and F (Trespass). The question presented is whether the neighbor's fence encroaches (trespasses) on the client's property, and if there is an encroachment, has the neighbor acquired the right to do so through adverse possession. This question is complicated, because trees obscure the boundary (affecting the open and notorious prong), and the neighbor may not have even known if he was obtaining land through adverse possession (in the lingo, did he have the right claim of right?). I could see a student struggling with applying the rules to this question. But on the bar, an applicant only needs to spot the relevant doctrine, and pray they can figure stuff out when in practice.

I worry that these questions are far too simple. If the states end up adopting the NextGen exam, they should increase the cut score (the relevant percentage needed to pass the exam). Finally, I worry how this exam will trickle down to law school pedagogy. Will professors shift their coverage to no longer require memorizing and applying the rules–only spotting issues? It's true that all lawyers have sophisticated tools at their disposal to research different topics. This new format seems to be a surrender to this technology–don't require students to do what they don't have to. I, for one, do not plan to change how I teach for this exam. And state supreme court justices should take a very long pause before adopting this new exam.

Swiftonomics, Kamala Harris and Decadent Real Estate: Your Questions, Answered.

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions. general position is a Luddite refusal to engage with AI-generated art.

Until it fools you.

Exactly. Right now, one of my three co-hosts is actually an AI-generated —

Shh.

— version. But I don’t know which.

I knew it!

I don’t know which one.

Nobody knows which one! I think that’s the plot of “Blade Runner.” [MUSIC PLAYING]

From New York Times Opinion, I’m Ross Douthat.

I’m Michelle Cottle.

I’m Lydia Polgreen.

I’m Carlos Lozada. And this is “Matter of Opinion.”

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So it’s a very special time of the year. It’s the holiday season for those who celebrate — Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Festivus, Saint Nicholas —

For the rest of us.

Festivus for the rest of us. And it’s also the last of our episodes for the year of our Lord, 2023. And in the spirit of the season, since we love our listeners, we asked you to send us what you want to hear us talk about for this episode, from episode ideas to quick Hot Cold reactions, to things that all of you put forward. And so we’re responding. So we’re going to start out in the first segment with quick reactions. And I think we’re starting with a voicemail. So let’s hear it.

I’m Joe. I’m 22. I’m from Minnesota. And I actually went to one of Ross’s talks when I was a student in college. I was actually in a monk class.

Oh.

So I was on a vow of silence. So I’m wondering if you guys are hot and cold on asceticism. And I’m just wondering if you guys meditate or exercise or how you self-care. All right, thanks.

Huh, wow.

Oh, wow. My apologies —

I wonder if he was meditating during your class, during your lecture.

Clearly, he abandoned the monastery.

Way to go, Ross. You drove him out of the church, nice.

So another failure. So who has a take on asceticism, hot or cold?

I can jump in on asceticism, weirdly. Joe from Minnesota says that he was on a vow of silence when he was in your class, which is why he couldn’t complain. And I —

It was on speaking engagement, not a class, Carlos.

Wow. Wow.

So asceticism, asceticism is a sort of intense self-discipline and self-denial relating to sex and food and other indulgences, right? Is that a fair description? Often religiously based.

But, you know, speaking of the vow of silence, I actually, in the late ‘90s, I was a wee lad. I did a silent retreat at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, which is where Thomas Merton, the famous Trappist monk, spent so much time. He called it “the four walls of my new freedom,” which was just a wonderful description. That’s in “The Seven Story Mountain.” I sort of cheated during the silent retreat because I would go into the library a lot and listen to the tapes of Merton’s sermons.

Huh.

So it was silent in terms of my speech, but not —

Oh, yeah, I thought that was OK.

— in terms of my — yeah.

I just thought you couldn’t talk.

Well, it’s like you can hear preaching on a silent retreat. I think that’s —

Yeah, but so I think I’m hot on asceticism, as weird as that sounds. I’m so hot on asceticism, but in the kind of Merton way, I think, and I don’t think he thought of it in terms of restricting your body from pleasure, but giving over your will to try to live life in imitation of Christ, which is how he saw it. So it’s a lot more to it than just giving up chocolate for Lent.

I mean, I like it theoretically, but I don’t have the time or brain space. That’s just like, this is —

That’s the whole point, to give yourself the [INAUDIBLE]!

But yeah, well, who’s going to pick up the pieces of my life while that happens? That’s my question.

The Lord.

Oh, right.

Our kids, some of our kids’ school does some sort of semi-secular meditation. And my son, who is a big fan of all forms of warfare, he’s seven years old.

Oh.

At one point, one of his grandparents heard about this and said, well, what do you think about when you’re meditating? And he looked at her, and he said, weapons.

[LAUGHS]: Boom, drop the mic.

So all right. Let’s do another one. Let’s hear it.

Hi there. My name is Olivia. I’m a college student in Baltimore. I would love to hear your take on Taylor Swift and her economic impact, her social impact. Tell me what you guys think. Love your show.

Oh, OK. So I am a fan. I’m into Taylor. Love Tay Tay. “Folklore” got me through the pandemic. Like, she’s made some fantastic music. She’s “Time’s” Person of the Year. She’s on the cover. And I’m here to call it. Enough. Maybe Taylor could take a break, you know? Like —

Oh, wow, no.

This is just like old-fashioned Milton Friedman supply and demand economics, but I feel like I worry that we’re teetering into oversupply of Taylor. And maybe she could tighten up supply and increase demand.

No, see, I’m completely in disagreement with this. I am —

If you don’t increase demand, you increase the price when you tighten up supply.

Carlos, are you perhaps a professional economist? Are you a trained economist?

Might you have you worked for the Fed at some point?

Yes, talk to us about Swiftonomics, Carlos.

No, no, no, no, no, no, I have nothing to say on Swiftonomics. And I’m with Lydia.

OK, Michelle has — we need the pro-Taylor take.

No, I’m totally pro-Swiftonomics. People have broken down not just kind of what her tour contributed to her pockets, which I’m all about. Girl power, you rake in that money, baby. She has created a product that people are dying for, and that’s great. But it also has been estimated that she contributed like 5.7 billion to the US economy when you factor in travel and hotels and food and merch and outfits and all these screaming Swifties. I’m fine with this. I don’t see any problem with it. It’s not like she’s selling drugs.

So onward. This one is a reader email from Matt, and he is asking about the Las Vegas sphere, the huge venue slash — it’s not a dome. I mean, it’s a sphere, right, rising above the Strip. And he asks, “Is it a gaudy eyesore operated by a malignant businessman that is wasting insane amounts of energy and money? Or is it a testimony to humanity’s ingenuity, a brilliant act of anti-decadence?” I think Matt might be —

I don’t understand that —

Why do we have to choose?

— pushing my decadence up.

Can’t it be both, Matt?

I don’t know anything about the Las Vegas sphere, but I will say there is a lot of room between a gaudy eyesore and a brilliant act of anti-decadence.

But is there?

But there’s a lot of space in between there.

Is there?

It’s a tribute to man’s enduring love of spectacle. It’s our Roman Colosseum. Hmm.

Maybe it’s a brilliant act of gaudy eyesore.

When it turns into an eyeball, it is so freaky.

Has anybody been to it? Have you seen it in person or just experienced it virtually?

No, I’ve not been to — I know lots of people are going to the U2 concert.

I’m in Vegas every weekend, so obviously.

I assumed so.

Ross has a little gambling problem.

Ross is a roulette man.

Ocean’s 11 was actually about me. The Julia Roberts character was based on my work. No, I’m honestly torn. I mean, I think in general, under my definition of decadence, Las Vegas is inherently decadent, that no matter how awesome you make Vegas, this sort of simulation of great human landmarks dedicated to casino gambling, it can’t escape decadence. But I will concede that if something in Vegas were to escape, it would be something as brazen and balls out absurd as the sphere.

It’s at least not pretending to be something else. It’s not a —

No, that’s true.

— fake pyramid or —

It’s not a fake pyramid.

— a fake eye. It is a really weird sphere.

You’re tipping me towards anti-decadence, yeah. All right, let’s move on to our next, which is, I guess, a surprise from our producers —

Oh, dear.

— that we’re just going to play.

Now I’m afraid.

That terrifies me.

Hi, it’s your producer, Sophia.

And I have a Hot Cold for you based on something I have become quite cold on this year, which are self-checkouts. I’m often not going to self-checkouts anymore and preferring the human contact at a grocery store. But I think about this in the larger span of this year, where there’s been so much talk about the doom of technology and AI. And so I’m wondering what piece of technology you are now cold on, going into 2024.

Well, that was the best question we’ve had so far. I can’t even answer it. It was such a good —

You’re not getting a raise, Ross. You’re not getting a raise.

Such a good question. Who’s got this one?

Carlos, you hate all technology. What do you got?

Well, it’s funny because you’re right. I do hate all technology, but I kind of love the self-checkout.

That’s because you hate people even more!

Even more!

Wow.

In the hierarchy of phobias —

The worst technology is the human.

I kind of love the self-checkout. I don’t know how meaningful the human interaction is that I attain in the checkout line. So I am not anti-self-checkout. I am lukewarm on the self-checkout.

Has anyone turned on a piece of tech?

I mean, I’ve done a real 180 on social media.

You love it now.

I love it now. No. Like, I recently left Twitter, and I think maybe for the last time, although I’m against definitive declarations —

You’re cold on — yeah.

I think this was the year that it really turned for me. And I was like, you know what? Peace out. I’m no longer doing this. And I’m on some of the other platforms, but in a much more desultory way. But I’m actually grateful for that. I’m glad that it doesn’t give that dopamine hit in quite the same way.

Taking back your brain.

My terrible realization is that actually Elon Musk’s algorithm works on me. The For You tab, where he just sort of delivers curated tweets to me about collapsing fertility and “Lord of the Rings,” actually keeps me scrolling and more. I hate myself for it. But it’s the reality. All right, let’s do let’s do one more, one more voicemail.

Hi, everyone. This is Pete from Minneapolis, Minnesota. I’m calling to see if you are hot or cold on making statements. It seems that whenever there’s a major event, most recently with Israel and Palestine, individuals and organizations are compelled to come out with a statement.

And I think there’s more than just moral showboating here. I think there’s something deep in our psyches as Americans, as members of a democracy, that makes us think our individual voice can turn the mammoth carrier ship of history and affect social change, and that in the face of injustice, somehow, we’re not powerless to make a difference. That’s pretty fascinating and something I would love to hear you all talk about. Thanks for the show. And I look forward to hearing more. Bye.

Mammoth carrier ship of history.

I love all these Minnesotans. This is great. It warms my heart. I feel like they’re all showing up.

Your people are showing up, Lydia.

My people are showing up, yeah.

So here’s the thing. That was such a good question that I think we need to go more than just quick Hot Cold on it. So I’m going to use that as a moment to say thank you to Joe, Olivia, Matt, and Pete, and especially our producer, Sophia, for your Hot and Cold suggestions. And we’ll take a quick break and be right back to talk about statements. Stay with us.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

And we’re back. And we’ll try and answer some of your questions, both broad and even personal. But let’s start with the last listener voicemail from before the break, which asked us about making statements, the pattern of every major American institution, from Ivy League schools down to your local progressive daycare, issuing a statement after any event of national import. What do you guys think about this?

Ugh. I’m serious. Obviously, they can do this. I’m sure some of them feel compelled to do this, but you’re just asking for a world of hurt. Do I really need to know if the guy who sells me my bagel, what side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict he’s on? Do I really need to know, going bigger, if the people who make my car, what their political positions are or how they come down on these? No. No, I don’t. I just think that that is going to land them often in the middle of a giant poop storm, and they’re just asking for more trouble than it’s worth.

Well, I think what has happened to a lot of institutions is that there was this period basically from, you could say, the election of Donald Trump onward when there was a set of political issues where the sort of center left and the further left liberals and progressives were very united. And so all of these institutions that were themselves mostly left of center felt really comfortable having a kind of corporate institutional opinion on what was happening in the world.

And what we’ve seen lately with Israel and Palestine is that as soon as you get an issue that divides a lot of centrist liberals from a lot of progressives, these institutions have a big problem, because everyone is mad at them for either making a statement or not making a statement or being too pro-Israel or too pro-Palestinian. And it seems like the answer is just to beat a strategic retreat from this pattern of statement making. But once you’ve established the pattern, if you try and beat a retreat, it looks like you are copping out and showing bias or favoritism or what have you.

I mean, I generally think that stay in your lane, you know. And of course, we are all paid to write our opinions. So it’s easy for us to be like stay in your lane because this is our lane. We write our opinions. We make statements.

Wait.

You know?

Wait, you guys are paid?

And boy, we take a beating for it, though.

But it’s interesting. You know, like, I was running a small podcast company with a mostly progressive staff during the George Floyd protests and all of that kind of stuff, and it wasn’t so much a need to make public statements because our parent company, Spotify, did most of that. And the public statements were quite sort of anodyne and doing things like turning the album covers black, things that were just gestures rather than actual action.

But the way that I responded to it was to actually just write letters to the staff about what I was thinking and feeling. And it’s funny. I’ve actually never thought about this. But I think that writing those letters to the staff was actually part of what convinced me that I wanted to be an opinion columnist.

Because I enjoyed doing them, you know? And they were personal, and they were like — it wasn’t, I feel your pain. It was like, here’s how I’m thinking about these issues, you know?

So these weren’t public statements. But it was just sort of me talking to a very amped up and emotionally upset staff about a range of issues. And that to me felt like a normal and natural thing to do in a small institution. But these big institutions with their big public statements, no thank you.

What I will say about these statements is, setting aside editorial boards, for whom this obviously does not apply, institutional voices are usually less interesting than individual ones. And especially statements that are issued in the middle of very contentious political debates have a sameness to them that is kind of deadening.

It’s the same reason that I really don’t like open letters, open letters that have been written by sort of very prominent and talented writers almost always are the worst thing they will ever write. The least interesting kind of writing that will ever be produced is that appears in an open letter. So the kind of drab sameness of the statements and the very unpersuasive low quality of the writing makes me in the anti-statement camp. I’d much rather hear individual pieces or individual expressions or individual statements than any of these institutional or collective ones.

You object to the aesthetics.

I would only —

The literary quality.

I would only qualify that analysis by saying that there is a kind of perverse pleasure to be taken in reading the statements put out where it’s clear the school has no idea what to say. And they’re trying to use that kind of anodyne —

That’s just meanness, Ross.

— predictable language not to make an anodyne point, but to make no point at all. And there is a kind of Las Vegas Sphere-like majesty that some of these statements achieve. All right —

That was a reach.

You’re a brilliant act of anti-decadence, yes.

No, it was a brilliant —

That’s a reach, Ross.

— anti-decadence. All right, let’s dive into some more listener correspondence. So Todd wrote us an email to bring us down into the muck of presidential politics.

Oh, my people! My people, Todd!

Todd asked, Vice President Kamala Harris was nowhere to be found in the episode we did where we designed imaginary presidential tickets. So why not Harris as part of anyone’s dream match-up?

Well, Todd, when you have a politician who is even less popular than the president that everybody is worried about in many polls, even Democrats are talking smack about her. She was a mediocre candidate in 2016, such that she dropped out pretty early. She has not dazzled as VP, which, admittedly, is a hard job to dazzle in. It is worth a bucket of warm pee. It’s usually not good to staff a dream ticket with those kind of stats. So even if you think Kamala —

But a real ticket.

Even if you think Kamala has done a better job than she’s getting credit for, if you’re staffing a dream ticket, she’s not going to make the cut.

I will follow up on Michelle here. And I think if none of us mentioned Kamala Harris, it’s because none of us find her worthy of being on our dream ticket. But I read her 2019 memoir, “The Truths We Hold,” and there was this one thing she did that kind of bothered me a bit and that has affected the way I view her.

When presented with a difficult conundrum between two competing ideas, she’s like, oh, that’s just a false choice. She writes, it is a false choice to suggest that you have to be for the police or for police accountability. I’m for both. I’m not for American citizens and against immigrants or the other way around. I’m for both. She constantly brings up this idea of false choices. And of course, it sounds very sage and wise to call something a false choice, but politics is all about making difficult choices among competing priorities. And Harris seems to want to stay on both sides of difficult questions, which made me instinctively not trust her as a president or vice president.

But there’s an interesting way in which what’s downstream of what there, right? Like, I remember when Barack Obama was sort of emerging on the national stage and sort of casting himself as a new leader for a new generation. And I think in “The Audacity of Hope” and sort of things he wrote and said around that time, he did a version of that, right? He said, I’m a Democrat. But the Republicans are right about some things. And he did some of what maybe she’s trying to do. She just — she doesn’t carry it off.

She has a problem as a candidate. Lydia, what do you think?

Well, I mean, I think I’m probably the most sympathetic to Kamala Harris among this group, in part because I think it’s a very difficult and tricky thing for a Black woman of her generation to find a place of equilibrium within politics.

And she’s of a generation that came into politics via law enforcement, which is kind of a tough fit and figuring out how to make that work with the current dynamics of the progressive side of the Democratic Party that whose support she would need in order to really, really vault her forward. I think that Black women often need to be just much, much, much more careful about how they manage their emotional energy, in how they present themselves.

So I look at Kamala, and I see a lot of things that I deeply understand of a woman of a certain age with a lot of talent, working within a culture that has certain expectations. And so I’m sympathetic. All of that being said, she still doesn’t make my dream ticket.

All right, let’s go to the next question, which is Jerry listened to our recent election day episode and wants to know, why are journalists still so interested in polls? Have you not read James Fallows’ critique — that’s my former “Atlantic” colleague and distinguished journalist and critic of the press — his critique of journalists’ fascination with polls? So what do we think? Are journalists still drunk on the polling Kool-Aid? I guess you don’t get drunk on Kool-Aid, so.

[LAUGHS]: It depends on how much sugar there is in it.

I can tell Lydia has much to say about it.

Lydia.

Thank you. I mean, I am going to take a slightly — I mean, I have an enormous amount of respect for Jim Fallows. He’s an extraordinary journalist. And his positions on these things, I think, are sometimes flattened and and caricatured in a way that isn’t actually true. I mean, I think that as a journalist, I always want to have more, rather than less information. And the question is, what do you do with information? How do you analyze it? What weight do you put on it?

So to me, polls are just another form of information. And the reason you started doing polls is because understanding what large numbers of people say is really useful to getting a sense of what’s going on out there in the country. And there are lots of problems with it, and particularly now, with cell phones and who actually answers their phones and all that kind of stuff, there are issues.

But coming back to Jim Fallows, he has this line where he says that we should think of polls as climate versus weather, which I think is actually a really useful thing. Weather is like, is it going to rain tomorrow. And if your poll is like is so-and-so going to win or is so-and-so up or down, that’s actually not that useful. But if you think of it as a more kind of like, this year is going to be hotter than any year that we’ve had in human history, then that way of thinking about polling is actually more useful.

Yeah. So I’m going to take Lydia’s brilliant reference to the climate versus weather analogy as a bridge to the next question, which is from Rebecca, who emailed us because she’s interested to hear how we think about parenting in the age of climate crisis. She writes, not so much in the sense of how to talk to children, but how to be an adult handing off a world in so much trouble to younger generations. I like it best when the four of you get into ethics and questions of how to live and think about right and wrong in this very confusing time.

Now, I have strong feelings about this idea of the climate crisis as sort of this special challenge to parenting. My general view and, one, I’m coming to this as someone who does worry less about climate change as an existential threat to humanity than some people do. So obviously, the more existential you imagine climate change to be, the more worried you will be about what it means for your kids.

But my general view is that the human race depends on people having children and making optimistic decisions about the future and having hope for their children, even in the face of the various inevitable calamities, to which human beings are heir. And that if climate change presents a set of real and substantial problems to our civilization, at the same time, our civilization is the richest, healthiest, in many cases, not always, but pretty healthy, longest lived civilization in all of human history.

And even if climate change threatens that, it still, in no way, creates conditions at all like the conditions in which your grandparents and great grandparents and infinitely far back great grandparents had children and made it possible for you to exist today. So I think there’s just a fundamental hopefulness that human beings should carry with them in the act of forming families and begetting children that, yes, there will be challenges. It may not be climate change. It might be just as no one anticipated, the coronavirus. It may be some —

Alien invasion.

It may be the alien — thank you. It may be the alien invasion, but you have to assume that it is good for human life to continue, even in the face of these challenges, and that your kids will be no worse off in facing these challenges than the generations upon generations of people who had kids and flourished and struggled and suffered in much more difficult circumstances, certainly, than we in the United States are likely to face.

That was beautiful, Ross.

All right, let’s go on to Leslie, who says, “Please, more book recommendations.”

[GASPING]:

Oh, god.

Oh, I love the readers. I love the readers.

“I read ‘The Transit of Venus’ after Lydia —”

Yes!

”— recommended it this summer. What an exquisite book. I would also like to know more about Carlos reading out loud to his kids. In my experience, as they age, they sometimes become less cooperative with reading aloud. But he seems to be reading with older kids, high school aged.” Carlos.

I’ll let you all deliver the recommendations.

What?

No, and then I can give the specific answer to the specific question that —

No, I’m calling BS.

— was aimed at me.

I want to hear your book recommendations.

I do that all the time.

This is just for you, Carlos.

I don’t care.

When people say like, what book should I read, what book do we do, like, I don’t know. I don’t know you.

Stop overthinking it and just tell us what to do.

What are you reading? What are you reading now?

It always bothers me. I’m reading a book I’m very enjoying. It’s called “Fire Weather” by John — Vaillant? I’m not sure how to pronounce the last name, V-A-I-L-L-A-N-T.

Oh, yeah, it was one of The New York Times top 10 books.

Yes, it was. Yes, it was. And it is about a extraordinary fire in Canada in 2016. What I’m enjoying — so I’m about halfway through it. I’m enjoying so far about this book is, how the fire itself is a vibrant and compelling character in the book.

Oh, I love that.

It comes alive in just sort of extraordinary way. So “Fire Weather.” That’s it.

See, I’m going to read that.

But now about reading with my children, that is one of the great pleasures of my life. Not just my family life, but my life, period. I hope it’s a great pleasure for my wife and my children as well.

Who cares?

But the thing is, I’m not that worried about the issue that Leslie raises in terms of finding books that can appeal to different ages and that they kind of age out of it, because think of the books that you’ve read and reread in your own life. You keep finding new things in them, because you’re a different reader. You’re a different person every time that you read.

One of my favorite books growing up and still one of my favorite books is Louise Fitzhugh’s “Harriet the Spy.” When I first read “Harriet the Spy,” I was focused on Harriet at school and on her spy route because those were the most kind of interesting and accessible and relevant parts of the book to me. As I got older, I was much more interested in Harriet’s relationship with her parents, which is a fascinating part of the story.

So when I’m reading with my kids, who I have one in high school, one in middle school, and one in elementary school, we end up reading books that can appeal to each of them in a different way. Like, you read “Animal Farm.” It’s different to a fourth grader and to a ninth grader. They can both get a lot out of it.

Do you do funny accents when you read?

I sometimes change the voices a little bit, and they like that. They think it’s fun. But I don’t focus so much on that.

OK, because that’s one of my special pleasures as a reader.

Ooh.

All right, let’s end on one of the shorter questions we received from listener Doug, who asked, what would this show be like if you were all drinking wine?

Thank you, Doug, I have asked that a million times and nobody’s listening to me.

Who’s saying we’re not?

I was gonna say.

You can’t see us.

Yeah, I’m more of a martini person than a wine person, but I think that Ross would probably agree with me more if he was drinking.

No, the truth is, I am in my —

Lydia, that’s such a sneaky way of saying that deep down, Ross actually subscribes to your worldview.

Ross is a closet progressive.

Yeah.

That’s the in vino veritas view, but the other view is that, yeah, if you altered my consciousness in some sneaky way, I would have some bad opinions. I would fall asleep. That’s the sad truth.

I would sing, and nobody wants that.

Oh, I would sing.

Oh, we’d all sing.

There’d be a lot of singing.

There’d be singing.

There’d be some Taylor Swift being sung.

Carlos?

Does it have to be? Oh, my God.

Don’t be a baby.

(SINGING) We were both young when I first saw you. All right. Let’s leave it there. Singers’ privilege. When we come back, we’ll share what we would like to see stick around from this year into next. Hang in there.

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And we’re back. So since this is our final episode of the year, I thought we would just end by talking about what we want to take with us from 2023 into 2024, a thing or a feeling or an experience that will stick with you from the year that was or the year that still is, but is vanishing as we speak. Anyone?

Well, I am moving, as I’ve mentioned a few times on this podcast. My wife said to me the other night, I feel like our whole personality is that we’re moving because we just talk about it constantly. But the thing that has actually been really wonderful in the move is the Buy Nothing group that I belong to on Facebook. We are downsizing from a big apartment to a smaller one. And so that’s involved trying to get rid of a lot of stuff. And it turns out it’s really hard to give things away.

But I love my Buy Nothing group. Like, I’ll post something on there. I’ll be like, hey, I have this backpack. It’s a great backpack. And the ability to give it to a person who will actually use it and appreciate it and to have that kind of human to human connection, rather than just stuffing it in a bag and leaving it at the Goodwill Depot or something, I don’t know. It’s just been really great. So I want to take that energy of giving and sharing and perhaps consuming less with me into 2024.

Well, I’ll go next. I took — well, I should say my wife and I took our family of four children 12 and under to Europe this summer. We went to London and Amsterdam and Paris, and back to London and to Stonehenge and to various manors and castles all the way up to Scotland. And it was a wonderful time. And honestly, this is a very sort of dad thing to say, but it was one of the greatest logistical triumphs of my entire life. And I intend to carry —

Clark Griswold.

I intend to carry that satisfaction with me into whatever trips await in 2024. Michelle?

OK, I’m going to get uncharacteristically mushy, so without getting into too much detail, this was a year when my household had multiple kind of heart-stopping health scares and crises and multiple surgeries. And at every step of the way, no matter what I needed, I discovered that my friends were going to be there, and they were going to step in, whether it was food or sitting in a waiting room or calling in the middle of the night or just letting me cry. They were going to be there for me.

And at some point, I even told my husband, you always have these fantasies about, well, we’re going to retire, and we’re going to move to the south of France or this island or the villages or whatever. And I’m like, honey, I don’t think we can actually move away from this group of people that we have come to depend on so much and love so much. So it’s completely cheesy to say you can’t live without somebody, but my end of the year shoutout for my friends is we would not have made it through this year without you.

Oh, I love that.

Wow.

Carlos, tough act to follow, but —

You’re gonna go with “MoO” It better be “MoO.”

— see us out into 2024.

So I changed jobs about a year ago. And changing jobs is not always easy — new colleagues, new rhythms, new expectations self-imposed. And I discovered a couple of things. One, that the job of an opinion columnist, as sexy and exciting as it sounds —

High profile.

— can be a little isolating. It’s kind of you and your words and your thoughts. But one thing that was new to me this year, as cheesy as this sounds, was this podcast, was “Matter of Opinion.” And “Matter of Opinion” has given me a community that I did not expect to get when I came to The Times. I did not think I’d be doing audio. And working every week with the producers and the editors and the co-hosts has been a small, unexpected blessing for me. So I hope if —

You’re not crying, I’m —. No. I’m not —

I know. I hope —

I’m not crying.

If all of you — and sort of as unnatural as the audio medium feels like for me, it’s been a wonderful presence. Now, I hope to carry it forward in 2024. That kind of depends on our listeners.

The listeners.

That’s right.

But I imagine —

Carlos’s happiness is in your hands.

Yes, so anyway, thank you to the listeners, but really, to the team here that has given me this wonderful, new community in my new professional home.

Group hug for Carlos.

Group hug for all of us.

Group hug!

All right. That concludes our last episode of the year. Thank you to all the listeners who we heard from and all of those we didn’t have time to hear from for sharing your thoughts and spending your time with us this year. We’ve loved getting to know you and each other, even Carlos.

Thank you for coming along with us. And the best gift that you can give us is telling anyone in your life who you think might like this show. And leave a nice review wherever you follow “Matter of Opinion,” too. We hope you have a happy holidays, a great end to your 2023, and we will see you back in this feed in January. Have a good one, everyone.

Happy holidays, guys.

Happy holidays.

Amen.

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“Matter of Opinion” is produced by Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Phoebe Lett and Derek Arthur. It’s edited by Alison Bruzek. Our fact-check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones, Carole Sabouraud and Pat McCusker. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer, now and hopefully for all the years to come, is Annie Rose Strasser.

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