Say It to Someone
Andrea Ewalefo's best advice about money had very little to do with money.
One Newsletter. Our Community. Every Wednesday.
Thoughtful writing at the intersection of medicine, healthcare, culture, technology, and the human experience.
For people who value curiosity more than certainty. Join the conversation.
Andrea Ewalefo's best advice about money had very little to do with money.
Recognition can open a door, but a practice survives by returning to the next moment.
Mike Domangue, the lender who helped me buy my house, on who homeownership is for and why a 6% rate isn't the villain.
Andrea Ewalefo says following the standard advice cost her over $600,000. Her case for a system that fits your actual life.
In rural emergency care, the work is not only deciding what can wait. It is building the bridge to what cannot.
A conversation about purpose, pressure, and giving new mothers room to make informed choices.
A vocation can begin as a laughable answer and become a way of carrying memory, culture, and attention into the world.
A radiation oncologist on the part of care no machine can measure.
Chef Serigne Mbaye is building a fine-dining language for Senegalese food without leaving home behind.
The work of becoming is often less about certainty than about finding the next useful room to enter.
What hearing science, mentorship, and a startup have in common.
Prenatal imaging is not a formality; it is a chance to prepare.
A lung nodule is a diagnosis, a decision, and a person.
A few years on, what I remember most is how culture shows up in the exam room—quietly, constantly, and usually at the exact moment you think you’re only talking about labs.
Medicine is more than the plan on the screen; it is the relationship that makes the plan possible.
The anatomy scan is a screening test, not a prophecy. It’s meant to find problems early, and it’s just as important to understand what it can miss.
The physician-owner rate fell from 76% in 1983 to 35.4% in 2024. Every metric doctors complain about — burnout, prior auth, prices, staffing — traces back to who is actually sitting at the table when the contract is signed.
A conversation about ambition, grief, and the kind of empathy you can’t fake in an ICU.
A decade into practice, ‘balance’ still isn’t a destination. It’s a decision you make on an ordinary Tuesday.
Medicine needs competence. It also needs people who can see past the checkbox.
The first Last Zebra guest was a childhood friend with a PharmD who told me, on tape, that a staff pharmacist clears less disposable income than a Chick-fil-A worker. Two and a half years later, the profession he described is the one every American pharmacy walkout is now describing back.
On patience, uncertainty, and the parts of medicine that do not compress well.
Three moments I did not have language for at 27, and do now.
Latin, medicine, and the sentence I keep coming back to.