Welcome to the Friday Wrap-Up for July 24, 2026. This is a short newsletter where I talk about 3 things: What’s on my mind this week, Recommended Reading, and Something Fun. Here's what's on my mind...
On My Mind
The Simplicity of Yellow Legal Pads. I am a man who has spent $30-40 on a notebook. Over $100 on a leather-bound disc book with refillable pages. More than I'd like to admit on fountain pens.
But over last weekend, I rediscovered yellow legal pads. I needed a notebook and grabbed whatever I found in the first drawer I could find. And I forgot how satisfying it is to use a yellow legal pad.
I stopped using them because most don't accommodate fountain pens. My complicated approach complicated my whole system, you might say. For the past week I've only used my yellow legal pad, and it's been delightful. I'm taking a couple of them on vacation with me next week.
In my "fancy notebook" phase, I fell into the trap of feeling like the notebooks I bought need to be used for something important. So it added some friction to my process. It's been nice to not have to think about where I'm going to write.
Now, I happen to like thicker paper in general, so I recommend the Ampad Gold Fiber Legal Pads (though Oxford makes some old standbys too).
Recommended Reading
I Got Slopped: This piece by Kashmir Hill is about the discovery of her biography on Amazon — something she didn't authorize and was never even contacted about. No, the book had been totally generated by AI, and she's not the only victim of someone trying to profit off of her story (in the laziest way possible).
The article goes on to explore the world of AI book..."writing"...and she even interviews an AI "author." Would you believe most reviews of these books are 1 star?
I tend to rail against AI writing for us more than most people. If you're looking for a shortcut, letting AI take a thought you have and turn it into a series of generic, soulless, statistically likely sentences isn't it.
In an age where you can create anything from nothing with a few sentences to a word calculator, the thing that will last is trust and human connection. And you will not get that by telling people you are too lazy to write your own thoughts down. You will not get that by trying to swindle people out of even $10 for a book you are claiming to write that you didn't write or research or review. AI is not the magical shortcut everybody wants to believe it is.
It is a tool that is great for certain tasks and not for craft. That is and will always lie with us.
Something Fun
Want to Feel Rich? Drink a Pineapple Cocktail: I enjoy trying my hand at interesting cocktails, and my favorite cocktail website, Cocktails with Suderman, has been doing a fantastic series on summery drinks.
As I prepare for the beach, I'm checking the most interesting sounding recipes and bringing some ingredients along with me. I'm excited to try a pineapple cocktail.
As an aside, I also use Suderman's Eggnog recipe around Christmas and it's always a huge hit.
Automation of the Week
Episode Artwork Generation: In something a bit meta, I want to talk about a new action I added to my "Friday Wrap-Up" skill, which helps me generate the assets for these newsletters/episodes.
Among other things, Claude has a Canva connector. So when I run the /friday-wrap skill, it will figure out the next Friday (including Fridays on the day the skill is run, which is usually the case), and send the date to Canva, grab my Friday Wrap-Up artwork template, and change the text on the image to the current date, then download it.
Since this is all happening while the video is rendering, it's a huge time-saver for me, and it means all the assets are done at the same time, as I'm prepping them for publish.
*Programming note: I'm on vacation next week, so there will be no Friday Wrap-Up.