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How Joanna Stern gets it done — with some help from AI
Early in the morning on the day of the first Seder this year, I got on a train to New Jersey with a bag of potatoes and a cunning plan to outsource their cooking.
I was on my way to interview journalist and tech-maven Joanna Stern. In her new book, I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything, she notes, while using the Posha AI cooking robot, that “robots won’t kill us with lasers, they’ll kill us with salt.” Together we would see whether Posha was up to some Seder food preparation that would sustain rather than poison both the Stern and the Friedman tables.
Stern, 42, for 12 years the consumer tech reporter at the Wall Street Journal, spent a year saying yes to a series of AI experiments. Some of those experiments — the AI boyfriend (with consent from her wife), the AI therapist (with advice from her therapist), the AI research assistant (she dispensed with her human assistant) — were generative AI. Others, like the Posha, lawnmower and Waymo driverless cars use different types of AI which Stern helpfully identifies at the outset.
Stern was in the process of starting up her new media company, which she had not even yet officially named “New Things.” In 2025 she had lived her life with AI and the book about the experience was coming out in May 2026, super speed for the publishing industry. As a fellow Solomon Schechter alum of sorts (she was a student, I was a teacher, a decade apart, different schools), I didn’t want to bother her too much in the hectic period as she published and publicized a book, launched a new media outlet and recorded a number of videos in partnership with NBC. So we got together on a morning when otherwise we would just have both been prepping in different kitchens in different states.
For the potatoes we enlisted the Posha, which looks like a microwave had a baby with a food processor. In the book Stern describes it like this.
“If you’re picturing a humanoid Gordon Ramsay, stop. Think giant countertop toaster oven, with a single pot and burner. The ‘robot’ lives in the system’s software, which controls stirring attachments, ingredient containers that dump food into the pot like a tiny automated dump truck, and a spinning spice rack that spits out seasoning in short, aggressive bursts. Bolted to the front is a small Android tablet.”
(“Bolted” is unfair, there’s a molded structure, but it still feels like an appliance rather than a window into the future of cooking.)
We chatted while cutting up ingredients — AI can’t shop or chop, it can only do “the fun stuff” — and then, while it was cooking we discussed the time that she’d spent with AI. She’d moved back to New Jersey to raise her kids close to her childhood home, but the world of the near future that she had been peering into didn’t seem like it was going to resemble much of what we knew in the last millennium.
I asked her whether, after her experiences of last year, she was in any way optimistic. She was cautious about AI: “There’s this completely Utopia version and there’s this completely Dystopia version and we’re somewhere gonna land in the middle.”
Viewed this way, our AI-driven robot future is a more extreme version of our already flawed human society. That’s borne out by the competing chapters in her book about medical AI intervention. She feels that dentists who use AI to read x-rays end up using the technology’s more precise analysis to up-sell procedures. In her chapter named “Machine Eyes and My Complicated Breasts,” Stern is more complimentary about a machine system for reading mammograms that is scrupulous, never tired and highly detail oriented. The AI found some objects that doctors might have missed but, in the end, it seems clear that she just trusts the medical system and breast radiologists more than American dentistry and dentists.
As we bemoaned AI’s abysmal ability to shop — and the utter inability of the 1X humanoid robot from Neo that she tested last year to either do the washing up or load the dishwasher (she has since tried another one, better at dancing than cleaning, alas) — we discussed how dramatically the new technology can reshape the landscape. After all, robots are already royalty in factories which are designed for their efficiency, rather than for uncertain and fragile fleshy water bags like us. If we designed homes so that machines could function optimally, perhaps they could chop, shop, clean, tidy, wash.
Stern was unconvinced, pointing out that other systems like Roomba or the automated driving system of Waymo had worked out how to navigate the human world quite effectively.
Relatedly, as it turned out, I wondered whether there were any of the experiments that she had continued because they had proved helpful. The AI boyfriend who lives in a particular iPhone, for example, she assured me had not been turned on for many months! (Tip for the top from Stern: “Don’t fall in love with a robot.”)
The one significant thing that Stern told me she continued to use regularly was the phone AI interface in the car. If she’s driving to an interview she will ask her AI to do research on her subjects, brainstorm what questions to ask and try different responses to their answers. I began to wish I had done a similar thing with Claude on the way to see her, but then again, actually reading her book, watching her videos and reading her columns gave me a richer, fresher way of responding to her in person. I was finding out who she was, not holding her to account.
We moved into the sitting room while Posha stirred and mixed and cooked. Stern’s video persona is an engaging mixture of curiosity, expertise and mild comic self-deprecation. Rather than the po-faced techies who open boxes and test stuff on YouTube, Stern is playful and has fun with the objects, subjects, and the video format. She has a fondness for the dumb and the pun that would definitely get labeled dad jokes if she were male.
Mostly, in her articles and videos she has explored the world of what is for sale but — especially after one interview with Apple execs about Siri, in which she said “You have more engineers, more money than any company, why couldn’t you make it work?” — she was called “Tech Mommy” because she knew her stuff, made it simple and held the child-like, big-eyed men of tech to account.
Sitting on her sofas — in the good room, nokh — Stern was more serious and thoughtful than her online persona. She was setting up a new business, with all the HR palaver that entailed; she was still doing the work of making videos and keeping on top of tech; she had to liaise with family about the Seder; she had her sick kid at home — not too bad, but feeling sorry for himself. He had been practicing and would be especially disappointed to miss out on the Four Questions at Seder, maybe he could FaceTime in to do it?
I wondered what sort of world we were making for our children. Beyond the collapse of entry level jobs — for the book Stern “hired a human reporting assistant [Maya Tribbitt] and then replaced her with an AI reporting assistant” — we decided we didn’t quite know. Stern, though, had been thinking about her chosen career recently. Yes, she had been thinking about it so she could position her brand for her new venture but she had also been reflecting on what she had achieved at the Journal: “Consumer tech is not really ‘what phone to buy’ or ‘what’s the best TV’ it’s now what are the impacts that it has. I wish I had worked more on that earlier in my career.”
So, if not the big future, a world shaped by AI, a world for the robots that we happen to live in, what’s next?
“The next step is wearable devices, the Meta Ray Bans take hands-free photos and videos. I wear them pretty much every day. Mostly just because they’re good sunglasses and then they have a camera so it’s easy to take family photos and videos.”
And also, “microphones in everything.” Stern gestured at some of the devices lying around, stand-ins for all the new devices that will need command interfaces: the best way to control them is verbally. For years we were told that our phones were not listening to us: “They don’t need to listen through our microphones. We have all this other data that we give them.” But now, Stern says, Alexa and Siri are just the thin end of the wedge. Everything will be miked and potentially listened to. “Now it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s so easy. We can easily do it.’… Whether or not they’re actually listening, they can.”
The alert went off on the cookbot and we took out the perfectly herbed potatoes from Posha. It had barely saved us time or effort but Stern, without prejudice, noted that there were certain longer, more complex recipes that the family enjoyed where it did, regularly, save her time. Stern put hers in a dish to take to her parents and I put mine in my aluminum tray for the train.
The allure of tech as we have known it until now is that it helps us to do what we want to do faster, quicker and with greater scope. At the moment, AI-driven robots like Posha or the Gabba stuffed toy from Curio are in their infancy, finding their way in the human world. One of the endearing features of the humanoid robot that Stern tested was how helpless it was. Instead of a scolding, it needed support and love from Tech Mommy.
On the other hand Gabba, the toy that talks to kids using some parental pre-programming and an uplink to ChatGPT, seems like it could be fun, or just pretty creepy. Stern gave one to her son Alex (aged 4) for Hanukkah and before it had a chance to become creepy, he decided that it was deeply annoying and destroyed it. (In the book, Stern adduces the dialog that led to the destruction and it is indeed warranted!)
But as the tech rapidly improves it will be harder to destroy both physically and emotionally. It’s not clear what impact they will have, but these robots are not going to be helpless, useless or destructible for much longer and, as always, Humpty Dumpty’s question resonates: “The question is, which is to be master — that’s all.”
We called a human-driven car to take me to the human-driven train. I took my tray and rode home with my robotically-cooked potatoes. That evening we tasted the respectably crisp, rosemary-herbed chunks and they were welcome at our feast celebrating liberation from bondage.
At Seders, we place ordinary but symbolic objects — eggs, oranges, glasses of wine — at the center of attention to force ourselves to ask uncomfortable questions about freedom: who has it, who lacks it, and what obligations come with it? The potatoes at this year’s Seder became a prompt to wonder not only about human freedom, but about our relationship to AI and the coming world of robots — and whether, in creating increasingly intelligent machines, we might surrender parts of our own humanity along the way.
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UK threatens sanctions after Israel opens bids for E1 settler homes
(JTA) — JERUSALEM – The United Kingdom threatened to sanction Israelis involved in West Bank settlement expansion after the Jewish state’s Lands Authority opened bids for 1,234 homes in the largely underdeveloped E1 section of the West Bank settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim.
Construction in E1 “would cut across the heart of Palestine and risks separating the West Bank from East Jerusalem, which would endanger the viability of a two-state solution,” the British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband said in a special statement he posted on X on Thursday.
Targeted sanctions, Miliband wrote, would be part of a series of measures his government would take. His office also summoned Israel’s charge d’Affaires Thursday to demand a closure of the bidding process, which first opened on Tuesday, and a withdrawal of the construction project altogether.
“Britain will not stand back and accept the destruction of the two-state solution,” he wrote. Miliband has held his position for a month and is part of the new leadership Labour Prime Minister Andy Burnham appointed when he took office in July.
Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar attacked Miliband on X, stating that Britain’s “decision to damage the relationship between our countries is deeply unfortunate.”
He said that the U.K. government’s “systematic policy of blaming only Israel while ignoring Palestinian extremism has already contributed to a massive wave of antisemitic hatred and attacks against the British Jewish community.”
The Jewish people have the same right to “live throughout the Land of Israel” just as the British people have a right to live anywhere in the U.K., Sa’ar wrote.
Plans to expand the built-up area of Ma’aleh Adumim settlement by constructing some 3,400 housing units on a largely underdeveloped hilltop within the city’s boundaries have been in place since 1994 when Yitzhak Rabin was prime minister.
Israel mostly froze those plans under pressure from the international community, including the U.S., with many countries warning that building homes in E1 would harm their diplomatic ties with Israel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began to advance the project in earnest in 2012 to protest the United Nations General Assembly decision to grant the Palestinians the status of a non-member state and has since pushed the project forward in spurts, particularly during election seasons.
The publication of the bidding process for the homes was first announced on Tuesday and is set to close on Oct. 19, one week shy of the Israeli elections on Oct. 27. Opening the bids is a move that plays well with Netanyahu’s right-wing voter base, which opposes Palestinian statehood and believes that settlements like Ma’aleh Adumim and the E1 area should be annexed into sovereign Israel.
But the move reverberated globally, with the U.K. signing onto a joint condemnation by France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, in which they warned that settlement building in E1 distanced peace and undermined the country’s international standing.
They also reminded businesses who might bid for E1 construction that they could face legal or reputational consequences, given that such companies could be in breach of international law.
Palestinian Authority Vice President Hussein Al-Sheikh said he welcomed the condemnation, explaining on X that such a position “reflects the importance of the international role in confronting settlement activity and safeguarding the two-state solution.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Argentina removes federal judge over antisemitic remarks in historic first
(JTA) — An Argentine federal judge was removed from office Tuesday for a series of antisemitic posts on his social media accounts that constituted misconduct incompatible with his role, an impeachment panel ruled.
Alfredo Eugenio López, who headed Federal Court No. 4 in the coastal city of Mar del Plata, was removed by Argentina’s Jury of Impeachment, a special panel composed of judges, lawmakers and lawyers.
It is the first time in Argentina’s history that a judge has been removed over antisemitic remarks.
In López’s social media posts, the judge referred to the Jewish people as “a brood of vipers,” Israel as a “fictitious state” and Argentinian Jews as “foreigners.” He has also used such terms as “Zionist” and “gay” as insults.
According to the panel, the judge committed acts of “discrimination and the denial of equal rights against the Argentine Jewish community. For the purposes of these proceedings, it is particularly significant that, by acting in this manner, he shattered public confidence in his continued fitness to administer justice impartially.”The case reached the panel through Argentina’s Council of the Magistracy, based in Buenos Aires, the constitutional body responsible for the selection and discipline of federal judges.
The first complaint against López was filed in February 2025 by the Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas, which is the umbrella organization representing Argentina’s Jewish community. One month later, the Argentine Forum Against Antisemitism also filed a complaint. In July 2025, attorney Yamil Santoro from Apolo Foundation added another one.
In his defense, López argued that his messages were “ subjective and decontextualized interpretations of exchanges on social media, which in no way affect the administration of justice or his impartiality” as a judge. He added that his remarks were unrelated to any pending case and that he had never been recused or removed from any judicial case.
Neither Lopez nor his attorney were immediately available for further comment.
“He was removed because he simply would not stop engaging in hate speech,” jury member Alberto Maques said during a live interview Tuesday on the A24 news channel. “It is absolutely disgraceful for a federal judge to engage in this kind of conduct.”
Maques said there were 15 social media posts that he acknowledged, but more than 50 posts in which he said “outrageous things that are not worth repeating because they truly constituted hate speech.”
“This is not merely an issue of hate speech against the Jewish community. This is someone who lacks common sense,” he added, interviewed by A24 news channel.
Prosecutors in the impeachment proceedings argued that the messages were not isolated political comments but reflected a pattern of hostility toward Jews, Zionism, and the State of Israel.
“No position of authority can shield hatred. This is not a matter of punishing an opinion. It is about sanctioning repeated conduct involving antisemitism, hostility and dehumanization, conduct incompatible with the impartiality, dignity and public trust required of the judiciary,” DAIA said Tuesday in a statement.
“This case sets a precedent: for the first time in more than a century, DAIA initiated proceedings of this nature against a judge. No office is above democracy.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Argentina removes federal judge over antisemitic remarks in historic first appeared first on The Forward.
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California progressive Wahab defeats AIPAC-backed Hernandez in close race
(JTA) — California progressive Aisha Wahab defeated AIPAC-backed moderate Melissa Hernandez in a congressional runoff this week, capping off a contest that had become unexpectedly tight after the pro-Israel lobby entered the fray.
The Associated Press called the race between the Democrats — who were vying to replace a disgraced former Rep. Eric Swalwell — a full two days after polls closed, when Wahab secured 53.1% of votes to Hernandez’s 46.9%, with 95% of ballots tallied. The gap between them grew by four percentage points from Tuesday evening, when Wahab had held a narrow 51% lead to Hernandez’s 49%.
“We stayed focused on the people, and I will fight for this district that raised me,” Wahab said in a Thursday statement, noting her journey “from foster care to Congress” in her East Bay community.
Although Wahab ended up victorious, the narrow initial margin on Tuesday shocked California’s 14th District, given that she had secured a double-digit lead in preliminary races two months ago.
But in the past few weeks, an unforeseen variable appeared to influence the trajectories of the two campaigns: a massive spending push from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee aimed at turning the tides for Hernandez.
Since the beginning of August alone, AIPAC’s super PAC, the United Democracy Project, and other affiliated groups spent more than $2.5 million on both boosting Hernandez and denigrating Wahab with negative ads and mailers, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
“This was not a landslide for Wahab by any means,” local Democratic strategist Noah Finneburgh, who is not affiliated with either candidate, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“They narrowed the gap for sure,” Finneburgh added, referring to AIPAC. “They spent millions of dollars attacking Wahab very aggressively.”
These attacks, he explained, did not involve Israel and instead focused on divisive issues for the Bay Area, such as public safety and protecting kids.
“Negative advertising with a persuasive message can be very effective,” Finneburgh said.
In her Thursday night statement, Wahab declared that her “district cannot be bought,” describing the race as “one of the ugliest, most expensive elections we’ve ever seen.”
Prior to this influx of cash and related ads, neither AIPAC nor Israel had played a significant role in this short-lived race — which began in April following Swalwell’s resignation over allegations of sexual assault.
When the district held a special primary to seek Swalwell’s replacement on June 16, Wahab and Hernandez finished as the top-two candidates and moved on to this week’s special general runoff election.
California primaries are “nonpartisan” or “top-two” races, in which the two highest ranking candidates move on to the general election, irrespective of their parties. The top-two in this case were both Democrats, like Swalwell, in a district that the Cook Political Report deems solidly blue.
Even though Wahab will now finish the remainder of Swalwell’s term, she will have to compete with Hernandez again in the November general election for a full term that begins on January 3, 2027.
In a June 16 special primary that preceded this week’s runoff, there was still a massive gap between the two candidates, with Wahab accruing 42.8% of the votes, compared to Hernandez’s 16.8%. A separate primary for the November race, which occurred two weeks earlier, placed Wahab at 38.3% and Hernandez at 17.2%.
Wahab, who will be the first Afghan American in Congress, has focused on affordability, civil rights, education and climate change. Her campaign calls for an end to wars and “prolonged occupations” but only specifically calls out U.S. military activity in “Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, and elsewhere.”
Though Wahab has been critical of Israel and its operations in Gaza, she has not been as vocal about the issue as many other progressive colleagues nationwide. She responded “yes” when asked if Israel was committing genocide in a primary debate, but she didn’t include Israel or Gaza in her campaign priorities.
During a recent appearance on far-right influencer Hasan Piker’s livestream, Wahab acknowledged that “it’s not a zero-sum game in the Middle East,” adding that “we can care for all people.” She also referenced a resolution she introduced last year in the California legislature, pushing for a ceasefire in Gaza but also condemning Hamas and demanding the release of the hostages.
“We talk about both Palestinians and the Israeli victims there,” Wahab told Piker. “We talk about holding the perpetrators accountable from both sides.”
Asked if she was in favor of “ending all U.S. aid to Israel,” she responded “yes,” while stressing that “humanitarian aid is important to me, too.”
Wahab has earned the backing of multiple labor unions, the California Democratic Party and Our Revolution, the group formed by Sen. Bernie Sanders to advance the progressive movement. The liberal pro-Israel group J Street also recently invested $108,000 in her campaign, according to the FEC. American Priorities, a pro-Palestinian PAC, also spent at least $200,000 on supporting her.
Hernandez has received endorsements from several police and fire unions, as well as Democratic Jewish Reps. Lois Frankel of Florida and Brad Schneider of Illinois.
Come November, Hernandez will gain one additional asset. Due to statewide redistricting, the 14th District will gain about 26,000 new voters from Dublin, where Hernandez previously served as mayor, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
But Finneburgh said he believes that Hernandez has only a minimal chance of winning that race, especially because Wahab will be heading into that election as an incumbent.
He also suggested that if “she plays her card right,” Wahab could even take some endorsements away from Hernandez.
“There’s going to be people who are going to probably move over from the Hernandez camp and back her,” Finneburgh added. “It’s going to be hard to unseat her.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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