15 issues over 15 Saturdays so far since the inaugural issue of The Sunday Blender on January 27 during the Chinese New Year of 2025. I’m mildly surprised that I’ve come down on this path this far and kept doing this for so long.
It’s been a pleasure to see my nine-year-old son of nine year old flipping through the printed copy of this weekly news digest on our Sunday breakfast before going for his badminton class.
It’s been a pleasure to see this carefully curated newsletter resonate with many friends of kids in the same age group who share the same view that reading is a good habit and short videos are harmful.
The Sunday Blender has gathered a sizable and steadily growing subscriber base. Let me clarify a few things.
Why do I do this
As explained in this earlier post, “Make News Interesting for Kids”, I created The Sunday Blender because it seemed useful to my son. He loves reading it and has been its biggest fan. That means the world to me. I would continue to do this even if he’s the only reader ever. I don’t think any traditional media can deliver what The Sunday Blender does for him. They’re either too childish, too bleak, too progressive, too politically correct, too narrow-minded, or just too boring.
I spend the same 2-3 hours every Saturday to create a new issue, regardless of whether my subscriber base is 1, 10, 100, or 1,000. If this newsletter can be read by more kids with a curiosity to learn about the world, that’s all the better.
At present, all the articles are available for subscribers on the free tier. Starting from July 1, 2025, I’ll make the additional PDF version exclusively available to paid subscribers (monthly, yearly, or lifetime), like in this issue on May 3, 2025, while free-tiered subscribers can still receive all the issues in their inbox as before. If some subscribers are willing to pay more to support my effort, they should receive more benefits. Substack, the platform I’m using to write this newsletter, allows me to create many exclusive perks for paid subscribers. I’ll explore those later when the subscriber base is large enough.
Right now, I’m just trying to grow the subscriber base to 1,000. This milestone would signal that The Sunday Blender has established a broad appeal beyond my immediate social circle (who might be reluctant to say “no” to me). It would validate that it has found its niche and served an unfulfilled need. It would prove that it has value.
If you decide to become a paid subscriber, it’s a precious token of appreciation. As of now, your exclusive perks would be rather limited. You don’t have to, but thanks a ton!
It’s actually quite a joyful process for me personally whenever I edit the latest issue. I’m bombarded with information overflow in my line of business. Selecting the right information source is becoming a craft, a science, or even an art. I also learn a great deal about the global affairs that I would otherwise probably miss if I just buried myself in the daily grind. The Sunday Blender pushes me to challenge conventional wisdom and develop a much more balanced view of the world.
How can you help?
I can use your help to refer The Sunday Blender to more friends, whose kids share the following characteristics:
Curious, with a strong desire to learn about the bigger world outside of school life
Enjoying reading, rather than watching endless short videos (boy, that’s hard)
Developing independent thinking by understanding the world based on facts
As for the parents, why should they trust the contents of this newsletter?
It’s a non-political newsletter. I do my best to remove any politically sensitive content or biases. It’s based on verifiable facts, not another op-ed from the New York Times or Fox News.
It’s better than the real world. It does not faithfully report out every school shooting in America, or very famine in Africa, or every military coup in southeast Asia or South America, or every bicker between US and China, or every executive order from Donald Trump, or every new dress from Jennie of BLACKPINK, or whatever new sighting of Kanye West. There is enough clickbait out there on every social media platform. Kids don’t need to know those. We want them to aspire for this world, not to be discouraged by it.
It’s educational. Every issue covers technology, science, nature, environment, culture, lifestyle, history, and sports. It tells them the beauty and the diversity of the world, the awe-inspiring wonders in the universe, inspiring human stories from their struggles and journeys of redemption, the whole lot.
Let’s make news interesting for kids, together.
How do I do this
I source news from three channels: Twitter (I follow all the major news outlets in every vertical), AI LLMs (“tell me the top 10 tech stories in the last seven days”), and WeChat official accounts (which surprisingly cover many blind spots that the Western media misses). I bookmark a headline story as I see it and come up with a list of 20+ stories for the new issue on Saturday. I select stories that are most impactful and interesting.
The summation part is then handled by large language models (“LLM”) of AI, like “give me more details in 100 words about Game 7 of Lakers vs Timberwolves”. I was an early fan of DeepSeek R1 in January 2025, then grew tired of its severe hallucination, slow response, and general retardiness. I use ChatGPT 4o and Grok mostly now. I still need to do some manual editing to remove unnecessary details from each story so that it will be easier for young kids to comprehend (for example, they don’t need to know the name of the general manager of the LA Lakers).
I use Google Search to pick a good-looking, license-free header image for every story. This is the most tedious and labor-intensive part of the whole process. I wish one day an LLM could draw New Yorker-ish cartoon comics, but none of the LLMs can do that yet.
I’ll do some fact-checking when I see something suspicious. Can’t fully trust the machine yet.
Who is Clayton Man?
For those of you who know me in real life, you might wonder why I use Clayton Man as a pseudonym, rather than my real name.
I’m a prolific public speaker in my industry, which is already a bit on the avant-garde side. News has become political in many countries. Things could get messy, as we still try to figure out this very chaotic and jaw-dropping 2025. I wanted to keep a Chinese wall between my professional persona and this protected realm for kids, however thinly veiled it is.
Thank you for understanding.
How to access The Sunday Blender
This newsletter is hosted on the Substack platform, one of the largest tech platforms for content creators in the world. You can access issues of the Sunday Blender in three ways:
The website, https://weekly.sundayblender.com
The app of Substack
Your email inbox
Email would be the best way. The website and app can be easily blocked, but emails will not. If you reside in a country where Google is blocked, you should not be surprised that every other tech platform and social network is blocked as well, including Substack. So you would need to visit the website or the app in some other scientific way.
Just go with your email. The new issue of The Sunday Blender delivered to your inbox should be a fully rendered HTML email with an image for every story. If you only see a raw text email, check the settings of your email service provider to turn on HTML mode.
I’d love to see your feedback. Feel free to leave them in the comments section of every post. In my own humble way, I’m trying to create a community of like-minded parents and their children who know how to navigate through this complex world. Make yourself visible to them and contribute to this community by sharing your observations, suggestions, and insights. Together we can wade through choppy waters and venture into the unknown.
See you all tomorrow on the freshly minted issue of The Sunday Blender!
best
Clayton Man
Last modified on 2025-05-09
