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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What Did the Chinese President Just Warn Us About? — The Thucydides Trap
On May 14, 2026, in Beijing, Xi Jinping asked President Trump whether China and the United States could overcome the Thucydides Trap. He has used the phrase for thirteen years. Search engines spiked. Most Americans had never heard it. They should learn it now. The pattern is real. Twelve of… More⇢
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Courage and Consequence – He Chose Shame So the Record Would Survive
A general who fought eighty thousand cavalry with five thousand infantry. An emperor who needed someone blamed. A court of officials who knew exactly what to say. One historian who said the other thing. The emperor sentenced him to death. He was offered the door an aristocrat walked through —… More⇢
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The Man in the Reading Room – PART III – The Conditions of Action
1933 produced a five-year legislative sequence the United States has never repeated — Glass-Steagall, the Wagner Act, Social Security, the Securities Acts — under six conditions simultaneous: a forcing crisis, a 313-to-117 electoral mandate, institutional capacity, judicial accommodation by 1937, organized labor as political force, and an information environment of… More⇢
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Courage and Consequence — The Richest Man in Virginia Who Freed His Slaves
The richest man in Virginia. Sixteen plantations. Sixty-five thousand acres. More than four hundred and fifty men, women, and children inherited from a grandfather called “King.” On August 1, 1791, Robert Carter III signed a Deed of Gift naming them by mother and by age and committing to set every… More⇢
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Courage and Consequence — The Woman Who Did Not Ask Permission
1850. The Fugitive Slave Act. Federal marshals can seize a free Black northerner on a white claimant’s word. Her family runs the Underground Railroad in Delaware. They cannot stay. She crosses to Canada. Three years later she founds the first newspaper in North America edited by a Black woman. Ten… More⇢
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Courage and Consequence — A Hidden Attic, a Public Book, and a System Indicted
Edenton, 1825. An eleven-year-old girl handed to a doctor by codicil. By fifteen, his demands. By twenty, two children he could sell. By twenty-two, a crawlspace nine feet by seven feet by three feet at the peak, where she would live for seven years to keep him from her son… More⇢
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Courage and Consequence – He Wrote in Arabic So the Record Couldn’t Erase Him
A Muslim scholar from Senegal. Twenty-five years studying the Qur’an in Arabic. Captured at thirty-seven on the last legal slave ship to Charleston. A month-long run from a South Carolina rice planter. A jail cell in Fayetteville with a fireplace and a piece of coal. He covered the walls with… More⇢
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The Man in the Reading Room – Part II – After the Diagnosis
The first essay, The Man in the Reading Room – Will He Be Right Again – traced the American economy from 1900 to 2026 and ended with a question. Whether a free people will choose, again, to govern the economic forces in its midst. This essay names the levers. Three… More⇢
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Courage and Consequence – He Turned Survival into Evidence
Kidnapped at eleven. Sold four times. Marched six months to the African coast. Loaded onto a slave ship with two hundred and forty-four others. Survived the Middle Passage. Survived the Seven Years’ War. At twenty-one, he placed forty pounds on a Quaker merchant’s table in Montserrat and walked out a… 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.
