By David Sher
I love Alabama. I’ve spent my life trying to make Birmingham and Alabama better.
But love doesn’t mean blind. And some of what our state does to itself isn’t conservative, isn’t cautious, isn’t Southern tradition. It’s just plain stupid. Continue reading 8 Ways Alabama is Stupid
By Randy Hutcheson
Every day, Birmingham residents generate enormous amounts of monetizable digital exhaust — streaming movies, using GPS, storing files in the cloud, scrolling social media, shopping online, and increasingly asking AI to do tasks for us.
That data has real monetary value. Continue reading Birmingham: The New Plantation Owners Don’t Grow Cotton –They Harvest Data
By Mark Whiteside
I will never forget the sound of that door closing behind me.
It wasn’t dramatic. No alarms went off. Nobody yelled. But for one moment, I felt what it might be like to know you couldn’t leave — and I could leave anytime I wanted. Continue reading Alabama Loves to Quote the Bible. Our Prisons Prove We Don’t Mean It
By Doug Martinson
Editor’s note: This column appeared recently in the Huntsville Real-Time News . I thought people in Birmingham might be interested in what leaders in Huntsville are saying about their city and ours.
I recently went to a wedding in Greenville, SC, which is a very well planned and beautiful city and one that Huntsville leaders went to years ago to get ideas of how to make Huntsville a better place. Continue reading Alabama Cities Should Follow the Lead of This South Carolina City
By Emily Wykle
For a long time, ambitious entrepreneurs in Alabama learned the same lesson early: if you wanted to build something big, you would probably have to leave. That belief shaped more than their careers.
It shaped where companies were headquartered, where jobs landed and where economic opportunity bloomed. Continue reading The Myth That’s Been Holding Birmingham and Alabama Back — Why It’s Finally Dying
By Robert Watkins
News Flash! If you are a dog or cat and can choose your birth state, you might want to avoid Alabama — no matter how cutely you wag your tail, shake hands with your paw, or roll over on command.
Alabama has a problem that most people don’t know about. Continue reading Alabama Quietly Killing Thousands of Dogs and Cats. Here’s What We’re Doing in Birmingham to Save Them
Editor’s note: I don’t do this often. But when we lost J. Mason Davis on April 24, I knew I had to bring back one of the most remarkable pieces ever published on ComebackTown — because it deserves to be read again, and because the man who wrote it deserves to be remembered.
Read it as a tribute to a man who wasn’t afraid to tell the truth — and as a reminder that honest voices, once gone, leave a silence that’s hard to fill. Continue reading Alabama Tried to get Rid of this Birmingham Man, It Didn’t Work
By David Sher
Walk down 3rd Avenue North outside the Alabama Theatre.
Look down.
See those stars embedded in rose-colored marble?
Birmingham residents have walked past them a thousand times without a second glance. Continue reading The Idea that Could Bring Excitement Back to Downtown Birmingham
By David Sher
Quite frankly, I am stunned.
Year after year, Alabama has been a punching bag for the press.
What a breath of fresh air.
Canada’s Globe and Mail — widely regarded as Canada’s most influential national publication —sent a reporter to the Deep South to figure out how Alabama had become richer than their country. Continue reading Most prominent Newspaper in Canada Declares Canada is Poorer than Alabama
By Don Erwin
In 2020 I wrote Buffalo Hunting in Alabama, a novel about economic development.
One of the plot lines involved Alabama competing against other states for a giant, blockbuster pharmaceutical plant. In my novel, the Birmingham metro won the project.
Fiction has now become real life. Sort of. I got the state right but the metro wrong. Continue reading Huntsville Didn’t Need UAB to Win Eli Lilly—And That Should Terrify Birmingham