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PODCAST

When the Flames Go Up

Magda Pecsenye and Doug French

After we divorced, we started a blog about co-parenting to learn how to work together until our kids were grown. And now that they are, and the world is so busy disrupting and disavowing what we thought we were working for, we"re looking to our community to help us all keep up. whentheflamesgoup.substack.com

society & culture parenting

All Episodes

33:03

Episode 71: Planning ahead

When the Flames Go Up ·

2025/04/10

After a few weeks off, we’re back behind the mics to catch up and pitch topics for some upcoming episodes. It’s been a busy time, and we’ve had a lot of opportunity to talk with friends about retirement (what even is that anymore?), parents, kids—and that big spicy meatball, health. This includes diagnostic tools and preventative diets for Alzheimer’s disease, which Magda researches passionately because it runs in her family. How helpful is a low-carb, ketogenic diet? Should you test for the APOE4

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32:01

Episode 70: Where's the Gray Mafia?

When the Flames Go Up ·

2025/03/06

We all knew of the American Association of Retired Persons when we were kids, right? It was that super powerful interest group that got senior citizens all those cool discounts. It started before Medicare in 1958 as a way to secure health insurance for 65-year-olds (a lot of them teachers) who had been forced to retire, in order to keep them out of poverty. But now that it’s 2025 and no one can retire, what purpose to they serve?AARP says it serves 38 million members, but what exactly does it do for

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55:30

Episode 69: Navigating college when the fog gets thick

When the Flames Go Up ·

2025/02/20

Kimberly Shepherd coaches young adults (and their parents) that college is just one of many paths for a high school graduate to take. And that path often seems impassable—whether you’re applying, choosing a major, or sussing out a potential career.It’s also important to understand that neurodiversity, learning disability, and emotional issues have nothing to do with intelligence, so it’s not uncommon for the most gifted people to struggle with executive function. When coping mechanisms stop working,

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39:14

Episode 68: Keeping up with culture

When the Flames Go Up ·

2025/02/13

Two extraordinary things happened on Sunday: 1) Kendrick Lamar livened up a noncompetitive Super Bowl with a halftime show that people will discuss for years to come; and 2) Doug didn’t watch it. In fact, he blew off the whole event, mostly as an experiment to test the limits of his FOMO.Weirdly, there wasn’t any. Whatever was worth watching could be watched later, without Tom Brady’s overpriced, braying platitudes. And the halftime show was almost as amazing as the polarized response to it. If you

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67:08

Episode 67: Healthy aging takes guts. Literally.

When the Flames Go Up ·

2025/02/06

After several years of suffering her own gastric distress, Maya Gangadharan consulted the Nutritional Therapy Association and learned a ton about how so much of our bodily function connects back to our GI health. Digestion is an inflammatory event, it starts in the brain, and it can become more complex as our bodies’ relationships to insulin, hydrochloric acid, and belly bacteria change with age.Now a functional nutritional therapy practitioner, Maya discusses the phenomenon of “leaky gut” and the

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34:40

Episode 66: What is Meta for?

When the Flames Go Up ·

2025/01/16

Now that Mark Zuckerberg thinks fact-checking is overrated—a decision described as both desperate and potentially disastrous—you might find yourself in a quandary over whether to keep using Meta’s social platforms like Facebook and Instagram.Even though Facebook’s credibility has fallen off a cliff and its feckless moderation often results in random bans and post deletions, we’re not ready to abandon the communities we’ve built over the years. There’s still value to be found, but like most things we

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26:54

A collective exhale

When the Flames Go Up ·

2024/12/25

Last week, the family endured a big scare after our son texted us the picture below with the caption, “something very, very bad has just happened.” He had hit some black ice on I-90 near Presho, South Dakota, and rolled his 1982 Chevy Silverado, which coincidentally was packed with everything he owned (or used to):Every parent knows that having a child is like wearing your heart outside your body, and it doesn’t get any easier when that child is out in the world and subject to the violent physics of

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69:42

Republicans like Bryan McGrath are sick of this crap,...

When the Flames Go Up ·

2024/12/12

Bryan McGrath describes himself as “a Russell Kirk, Edmund Burke, William F. Buckley conservative” who has written his blog, The Conservative Wahoo, since 2008. After 21 years in the Navy, culminating in the command of the guided-missile destroyer USS Bulkeley, he currently works as an author, speaker, and national security consultant.Bryan has always embraced his macro political firebrand-ery, but after the election re-elevated that guy, whom he has never liked or supported, he’s wondering what

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48:33

How broken are we?

When the Flames Go Up ·

2024/11/20

As Kathryn Hahn said recently, “the universe doesn’t give us anything that we can’t handle, but JESUS CHRIST.” There’s lots of emotion to sift through as the asbestos settles on this disastrous election, which once again elevated the worst man to the highest office. The horse is once again loose in the hospital, but now he’s older, meaner, and surrounded by hench-horses eager to get in on the stampede.So what’s the way forward? Are you out of fucks? If you know someone voted to invite more chaos

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65:54

Caring for parents in Tokyo means bridging a huge...

When the Flames Go Up ·

2024/10/30

Aya Yasukawa-Dudzinski is a “third culture kid,” a native Japanese who has spent almost all of her life in America. She has a full-time job and two tween daughters here, and her parents in Tokyo are adjusting to her dad’s newly diagnosed dementia. But that’s not the hard part. Aya’s parents are proud and private people in a proud and private culture, and her mom, in particular, is having a difficult time releasing her iron grip on control over her dad’s care. Her strategy for now is to think

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47:54

Reunions = high school + time

When the Flames Go Up ·

2024/10/23

Over the weekend, Magda got the biggest glimpse of her new husband’s life before they knew each other when they attended his high school reunion. They didn’t know which classmates would be there, so there was no chance to prepare for whom to embrace (or avoid). So everyone was essentially a blank slate. As it should be.You never know how a night surrounded by people you haven’t seen in 35 years is going to turn out. But you can’t deny that meeting them at that formative time forms a unique life

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70:54

Balancing the opportunities of a new life amid the...

When the Flames Go Up ·

2024/10/17

Now that her daughters are adults, Carlotta Stankiewicz thinks a lot about how she and her sister will take care of their parents, who split up decades ago and live two time zones apart. And really, nobody among the foursome gets along with the others as well as they might like.She’s also getting remarried in the spring and just quit her job, mindful of how difficult it might be to re-enter the workforce as a woman of a certain age. It’s a lot, but you wouldn’t know it from how well she finds the

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45:33

He thinks, she thinks

When the Flames Go Up ·

2024/10/10

We came up with the idea for this podcast topic after gauging the different reactions from men and women about the vice presidential debate last week. After a weekend of canvassing, Doug found that most men listened to the bearded guy’s glib, shameless horseshit and wanted to take him outside. But women reacted more fearfully, recognizing him as the oily gaslighter they all knew who disguises his blatant lies with practiced charm.Whether you’re in a long-term relationship and are focusing on each

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83:43

How to start HRT for menopause (even in Florida)

When the Flames Go Up ·

2024/10/03

If you’re considering hormone replacement therapy (HRT) to treat your menopause, this is the reference for you. Dr. MaryBeth Lewis-Boardman stopped delivering babies in 2021 in order to concentrate on menopause treatment full-time, and she’s very enthusiastic about how much the medical community has learned and how committed it is to keep learning.We cover a wide spectrum of menopausal symptoms (dementia? itchy ears?!) and discuss the initial questions that determine whether you’re a viable

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52:09

Are you happy now?

When the Flames Go Up ·

2024/09/25

What is happiness to a middle-aged person? Does it still feel like a realistic goal? Or have we lived through too much to aspire to anything more than contentment? Or satisfaction? In midlife, the pursuit of happiness can feel a bit like rubbing two sticks together to start a fire in the snow. The process can feel urgent and/or futile, but when you do manage to find that spark, your first thought is to remember how you got it and do whatever you can to keep it going.Among our consultations, the

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46:41

At least there was a bus.

When the Flames Go Up ·

2024/09/19

We’re back! And there’s a lot to catch up on since Season 1 ended a few weeks back. We got the college drop-off experience we always wanted. We traveled. We saw family. We got sunburned. We turned off the news for a little while. It was all pretty damn great.And after Doug biked his first metric half-century, he jumped at an opportunity to ride for more than double that distance just four days later. It was a time to try something challenging and not entirely all that well thought out, because it

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45:31

How's it hanging?

When the Flames Go Up ·

2024/08/07

Does just staying alive seem more difficult to you? This is the question on our minds as we end Season 1 and break for the rest of the summer. Because when you reach your 50s, you start coming to terms with the weird pains and limitations that your body starts imposing on you, often thinking “OK, what now?”It also becomes apparent that asking someone “How’s it hanging?” is absolutely a gender-neutral inquiry. In fact, anyone at this stage of the game who only has one “it” that’s “hanging” is making

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66:51

Sarah Lyman Kravits adapted to a decade of grief by...

When the Flames Go Up ·

2024/07/31

Sarah Lyman Kravits appreciates when people refer to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief, even though she knows they’re not based in reality. And she doesn’t feel all that brave about surviving breast cancer, since all she did was follow through on her only treatment options. After marking a decade since her brother was killed by a drunk driver, Sarah knows that grief for her only sibling is part of her now. And she’s content knowing she doesn’t know much else about how her emotions will

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51:26

Episode 53: As we live more with our finality,...

When the Flames Go Up ·

2024/07/24

It’s hard to keep up with the swift pace of death, which claims 11 people every second. When we recorded this, we were still processing the departures of Shannen Doherty, Shelley Duvall, Richard Simmons, and Dr. Ruth Westheimer. Since then we’ve lost Bob Newhart, Lou Dobbs, John Mayall, Sheila Jackson Lee, Doug’s cousin Tim, and about 6.6 million others.Oop. There go 11 more.With that as a launching point, we got to chatting about what we’d like to do with the rest of our lives, and what might

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64:41

Episode 52: Carolyn Sklar couldn't find a children's...

When the Flames Go Up ·

2024/07/17

After Carolyn Sklar’s grandmother (and namesake) died of breast cancer in her 50s, the family learned that its women carry the BRCA 2 gene. Rather than risk cancer, Carolyn opted for a prophylactic double mastectomy not long after her kids were born.When she wanted to answer their questions about why her body and mood were a little more fragile, she didn’t find any helpful resources. So, in her “spare” time, after parenting young children and maintaining a full-time (and thankfully work-at-home)

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80 results

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