What is this?

The Sunday Blender is a weekly newsletter that reports top trending news around the world. It’s made for curious English-speaking kids aged 8~15 who aspire for a bigger world and nurture a life-long habit of reading. Every new issue is delivered to your email inbox on Saturday. At present, this newsletter is free.

Out of scope

This newsletter does NOT work for kids who like to:

• watch an endless feed of short videos
• indulge in non-stop video-gaming
• limit his/her English proficiency only to a rudimentary level

What’s in it

Each issue comes with 20~25 stories. Each story has no more than 100 words, in plain English with a picture. These stories cover Technology, Global, Economy & Finance, Nature & Environment, Science, Lifestyle & Culture, Sports, History, Art, and Comedy. It’s about 10~15 minutes of reading time.

Why do this?

Because we love the smell of flipping through a freshly printed newspaper on Sunday morning.

Our nine-year-old boy studies in a bilingual school in Shanghai, China. About a year ago, he started becoming curious about current affairs outside the school. We went on a mission to find quality English (or Chinese, for that matter) news-reading materials for him. We searched high and low and could not find any that would meet our standards.

News used to be simple and easy. The Economist used to just give you the right fix to get through the day, but not anymore. Nowadays, from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, BBC, NPR, Associated Press, Bloomberg, to The Guardian, they are all too biased and imposed with too many ideological lenses. It is very hard to find a media outlet that can still serve balanced views while reporting positive, uplifting human stories.

Or, their contents are just too childish - OMG! A bear jumps out of the woods! They tend to grossly underestimate how smart the kids of today are.

Or, they still live in their own echo chambers with little coverage of China (Western media lost that capability long ago). Major topics in technology and the economy are increasingly shaped by AI and energy. If they cannot grasp what’s happening in China on these fronts, they’re missing half the picture.

So we figured we might as well take things into our own hands and create a newsletter for our son and his many little buddies. The advent of AI makes it possible to automate this laborious workflow of sourcing news, curating stories, and editing texts/pictures. I’ve used all the major LLMs (large language models) in this endeavor. My current favorite is claude.ai. Its summation strikes the right tone and information density, better than chatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and definitely DeepSeek.

We published the first issue on Jan 26, 2025. Our boy has been a big fan of The Sunday Blender, so are his friends at school. We find it an intellectually joyful process to compose each issue as we catch up with the world after a week of busy working and living.

How is it created

I read widely and source the stories. AI LLM does the summation (give me a 100-word summary of this recent story of xxx). I do some editing in cursor. I use Flux to manage the writing and publishing of my multiple publications, including this one. The Sunday Blender website is hosted on a smart contract on a blockchain, as I explained in this article Migrate from Substack to a Self-Hosting Newsletter.

I try to keep politics entirely out of The Sunday Blender. It’s not pretty, and they don’t need to be sucked into that.

As mentioned in Terms & Privacy, all the stories in this newsletter are for educational purposes only. They’re to spark spirited conversations. I don’t report original news stories and certainly would not do any investigative journalism. All the stories came from some existing media outlets. The Sunday Blender curates them, synthesizes them, and paraphrases them in a kid-friendly format.

While I try to cross-check multiple sources to mitigate AI’s hallucination problem, I cannot guarantee every figure, every detail is accurate or even factual (I don’t think anyone can claim that anymore for any news outlet in 2025).

How to read it

Using email to subscribe to this newsletter is the most efficient way (at the end of this page). Once you double-confirm, every new issue will be sent to your inbox over the weekend.

You can also download the PDF version of the issue. The link is attached at the end of each weekly article. We usually print it out on paper or let the boy read it on a 14-inch ebook reader. The PDF provides the best reading experience.

All the past issues are available on the website https://weekly.sundayblender.com if you bookmark it.

Or you can read it on an RSS reader with this RSS feed URL https://weekly.sundayblender.com/index.xml.

How can you help

I can use your help to bring The Sunday Blender to more curious kids and create better content.

• Share 📣 this newsletter with your friends whose kids might enjoy reading
• Leave a comment 💬 and let’s have a (anonymous) conversation. You can find the section of “Comments & Discussion” at the bottom of every issue. This feature comes from Rapport, which is integrated into all my other publications too. No login is required. You’ll be assigned a random animal name 😜.
• Like ❤️ the article to show your appreciation
• Star ⭐️ the public repo of this newsletter on Github. It’s an open-source project. PR is welcome!
• Follow 👀 the Twitter/X handle of The Sunday Blender @SundayBlender to grow its influence
• Join 🙋 the reader’s club on OpenChat - The Sunday Blender Readers Club (SBRC), which runs on a decentralized blockchain that is cross-border and requires NO personal information from you to join (not possible on any traditional IM, such as WeChat, Whatsapp, Telegram, Signal, Kakao, or Line).

If you have an interesting local story, please send me a DM on either Rapport, GitHub, Twitter, OpenChat, or just good old email clayton.man@sundayblender.com.

Who makes it

The Sunday Blender is created by Clayton Man, a parent who believes in the power of reading and whose alter ego happens to be at the forefront of the AI + crypto revolution. He leverages decentralized blockchain technology and AI to create many products for super content creators and growth hackers through Inturious Labs.

Is it free

Yes, for now. If I can scale the subscriber base to a critical threshold - like 1,000, I’ll start thinking about charging a fee, because that’s how I can validate if The Sunday Blender has found its true product-market fit. I’m working on a tipping feature that would allow readers to tip in fiat and cryptocurrencies. Stay tuned.

Since my boy loves this newsletter, that’s all the endorsement I need. I spend the same 2-3 hours every week, whether there is only 1 subscriber, or 100, or 1,000. That said, the more subscribers, the merrier.

Thanks for reading.

Making news interesting for curious kids since early 2025