By David Sher
There’s a moment in life when you meet someone and you understand why you get out of bed every morning.
I had one of those moments recently when I ran into a man who told me he’d been reading ComebackTown for years. He was genuinely excited to meet me. But I was more excited to meet him — because he personified everything this column has been about since it was first published in 2012. Continue reading Leaving Birmingham Wasn’t Rejection—It Was Survival
By Hunter Williams
Shanghai. Montpellier. Budapest. Hiroshima. Birmingham.
Read that list again. That’s not a typo — that’s the 2026 stop list for the FISE World Series, one of the largest action sports festivals on Earth, and this August, our city joins it. Birmingham is the only U.S. stop on the entire tour. Continue reading Birmingham Days Away from One of World’s Biggest Action Sports Festivals
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 Eric Thomas
What if you could land at Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport, step outside, and hop on a tram that carried you straight into the heart of the city — through Uptown, the Civil Rights District, the Parkside, UAB, Five Points, Lakeview, and back again? Continue reading The Magic City Loop: Birmingham’s Ride into the Future
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 David Sher
I wrote about Sam Tenenbaum, aka The Great Kaiser, when he passed away last year.
I wrote about my regret, my guilt, my failure to support him.
But I never expected what would happen next–or the lesson he would teach me, and all of us, from beyond the grave. Continue reading The Lesson My Birmingham Friend Taught Me from Beyond the Grave
By David Sher
One minute we are at the top of the world.
The next, we hit rock bottom.
Where is our confidence?
Where is our self-esteem?
Why do we think it’s okay to be judged by people who don’t know us and don’t care about us? Continue reading Birmingham on a Permanent Emotional Roller Coaster
By Don Erwin
Many fine articles have been published about George Barber’s life and accomplishments.
I would like to add a personal perspective. Continue reading The George Barber I Knew: The Visionary Who Brought the World to Birmingham
By Allison Black Cornelius
A foreign-owned tech company wants to build a massive 79-acre AI Mega Factory in Oxmoor Valley that consumes as much electricity as 200,000 homes and requires enormous water resources in a county that has suffered drought conditions in 17 of the last 20 years.
They want to put it right in the middle of quiet family neighborhoods, houses of worship, parks, small businesses, nonprofits, schools, and a golf course, where it will generate industrial-scale noise, heat, light, and traffic around the clock. To power it, they would erect 125-foot transmission towers carrying 230,000-volt power lines through residential streets. Continue reading A Foreign Company Wants a 79-Acre AI Factory in Your Neighborhood. Speak Up June 9th