The best job I’ve ever had was as an editorial writer at The Birmingham News in Alabama in the early/mid 1990s. It was a perfect combination of boss, colleagues, place, subject matter, and time of life. I left in 1995 because my then-fiancée (now-wife) had taken a job in Washington, D.C., and I was getting ambitious. But every once in a while I’ve wondered half-wistfully what it might have been like to stay at the paper, buy a Craftsman bungalow in one of the lovely neighborhoods that sprang up during Birmingham’s early-20th-century boom times, and burrow deep into the strangeness and charm of Alabama.