Welcome to the Critical Skills Blog, home to over a thousand human-generated articles—never AI—on topics that matter to continuous education. To find articles of interest, use the “Search” tab. Please feel free to comment, and please subscribe. All content on this site is free.
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The City That . . . . Furnished the Nation
Grand Rapids never made most of America’s furniture. For half a century it decided what good furniture looked like and when the country bought it, and then it lost the market it had invented. What the city kept, and what it built next, is the eighteenth profile in The City… More⇢
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The Measured Institution – Part V – Medicine
In 1961, Robert McNamara brought the finest analytical minds in America to the Pentagon and asked a war a question it could not answer: are we winning? There was no front line to move, no territory whose capture meant progress. So a number was built — enemy killed. It was… More⇢
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The Brand That . . . . Warmed the American Noon
In 1897 a twenty-four-year-old chemist in Camden figured out how to take the water out of soup, and a can dropped from thirty cents to a dime. That dime made a hot lunch ordinary in American houses that had never had one — and Campbell’s then held it for forty… More⇢
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How Healthcare Changed – 13 – Penicillin: The Ten Years
A Scot came back from holiday in September 1928, found a dish he had not washed, and saw that a mould had killed the bacteria on it. He wrote it down. Then nothing happened for eleven years, because seeing was never the hard part. Article 13 follows penicillin from a… More⇢
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The City That . . . . Poured the Breakfast Bowl
Two rivals in one Michigan town taught America how to eat breakfast — and the patent that started it names the wrong brother. Battle Creek built the ready-to-eat cereal industry out of a sanitarium kitchen, ran a six-hour workday through the Depression, and made more than half the cold cereal… More⇢
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Women History Wrote Out – 09 – The Heading Nobody Read
The first injectable that got people off Molokaʻi. The chemistry that emptied wards. A method printed in capital letters in a medical journal under her own name. Alice Ball was twenty-three when she pulled the fatty acids out of chaulmoogra oil and turned an unusable folk remedy into something a… More⇢
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The Measured Institution – Part IV – Education
Create a test to measure learning, make it consequential, and you get a system built to produce the number. In 1969 a school district on the Texas–Arkansas line paid a company eighty dollars for every grade level of reading gain; by the spring of 1970 the company’s own materials contained… More⇢
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The Brand That . . . . Bottled the American Table
Henry Heinz went bankrupt at thirty-one, owned nothing, and ran the new company for wages under his brother’s initials until a court set him free nine years later. What he built in those years put horseradish in clear glass so a stranger could see there was nothing hidden, and it… More⇢
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How Healthcare Changed – 12 – Aspirin and the Birth of Big Pharma
Aspirin was the first drug the world knew by name. Bayer synthesized it in 1897, trademarked it in 1899, and then in 1915 did something no respectable drug house had done: it went around the physician and spoke to the patient directly, stamping its cross into every tablet. That decision… More⇢
Meet Your Host – Charles Cranston Jett
Charles Cranston Jett is an author, civic educator, and Professional Certified Coach based in Chicago. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy (Class of 1964) and Harvard Business School, he served during the Cold War aboard the nuclear submarine USS Ray (SSN 653), where his tactical innovations helped inspire Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan character. He developed the Field Studies methodology to teach “Critical Skills” and was endorsed by the Department of Labor in 1994. He is the author of six books, including Super Nuke!, hosts three podcasts, and writes across his Critical Skills Blog and Civic Sage platforms on history, leadership, and the health of the American republic. He and his wife, Dr. Nancy Church, co-host the Chicago Salons at Water Tower Residences.
