In the room where they prep you for surgery, "Sixteen Candles" played on the small television. I was waiting with my husband, who was about to get his troublesome right knee forcibly removed and replaced with an improved model.

He had put off this surgery for many years. He tore his ACL playing basketball in his early 20s. For a while, he could wear a knee brace and get around fine. But after a few decades, the joint had worn down to the point where the bone was hitting bone. Even walking became painful. So he finally relented to undergo a surgery, that, frankly, we associate with much older people.

As the parents of young teenagers, I'd like to think we've embraced middle age. We go to bed earlier than we ever did before. We talk a lot about how things were different when we were growing up. I like to remind my spouse that he's nearly a decade further along this path than I am. But there are moments when you start to realize how far you have drifted from youth.

I noticed it when I started hearing a lot of passionate conversations about joints -- knees and backs and shoulders -- in recent years. Also, when did my friends start obsessing about apple cider vinegar remedies and the most effective eye creams? (Don't get me wrong; I'm terribly interested in these topics, as well.) Why was I well acquainted with my loved one's blood sugar, blood pressure and cholesterol numbers? How come the celebrities I loved growing up were dying?

In a culture in which people claim adulthood later and later, it's mildly disconcerting when you realize you've become physically older than you feel inside. For me, the moment of reckoning hit when my eldest child, who was born when I was in my late 20s, started high school. I remember high school vividly. It doesn't seem like it was that long ago. My child was leaving behind her childhood for adolescence and ushering me into a new life phase, as well.

It turns out acquiring children speeds up time. More so than any changes within myself, it's watching their speed-of-light growth that most acutely marks the passage of time. It takes so long for us to get from kindergarten to high school graduate, but our children fly through those years.

While we waited for my husband to be taken to the operating room, I shared some tidbits from Twitter that seemed appropriate for the occasion. Judd Nelson is as old now as Angela Lansbury was on "Murder She Wrote." My husband shook his head.

Remember when you watched "Gilligan's Island" as a kid, he said. Alan Hale Jr. played the Skipper. He looked old to me back then, he said.

Today, my husband is a decade older than the Skipper.

A former newsroom administrator described turning 50 to us in a way we've never forgotten. He explained that your body tends to feel different when you wake up in your 50s. Things hurt.

"If I woke up feeling this way when I was in my 20s, I'd call 911," he said.

We hope this new knee will turn the clock back for my husband. We are planning hikes and trips and walks around the neighborhood. He thanked me for pushing him to finally get it done. When your wife's persistent nagging turns into sage advice, it must be a sure sign of maturity setting in.

We turned our attention back to the television, to a time when teen idol Molly Ringwald ruled the screen.

Today just so happened to be her birthday, I said.

She turned 51.

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The boldface, all-caps headline on Canary Mission’s homepage says: IF YOU'RE RACIST, THE WORLD SHOULD KNOW. Specifically, it's targeting those it believes to be anti-Semitic.

Imagine Sophie Hurwitz's shock to discover her name and face on the shadowy, anonymous site. Hurwitz is a sophomore at Wellesley College and a graduate of John Burroughs School. She is Jewish and very involved in her Jewish community. She is also an outspoken advocate for Palestinian rights.

A friend contacted her to tell her that her name and photo were listed on Canary Mission. Sure enough, there was her photo and personal information among dossiers on student activists, professors and organizations that support Palestinian rights. The site claims to have sent names of listed students to prospective employers. The blacklist is designed to intimidate students and faculty members and prevent them from criticizing American policies about Israel.

"I was pretty freaked out," she said. "Strangers on the internet are being fed lies about me." She was most worried about becoming isolated from her Jewish community and wondered if she could pursue legal action. She was included on the site for the "crime" of speaking publicly about why she would refuse to accept a Birthright Israel trip, a free 10-day trip offered by a not-for-profit educational organization to all American Jews ages 18 to 32. Hurwitz said the trips are one-sided propaganda tools used to justify the occupation in the West Bank and Gaza and abuse of Palestinians.

In fact, it's her deeply rooted faith in Jewish values that compels her to speak out for equal rights and justice. She's a member of Jewish Voices for Peace and has a fellowship with the Jewish Women's Archive, a nonprofit historical organization. She says she's luckier than other students doxxed by the site since her employment has not been affected.

She heard about one young man who legally changed his name after being blacklisted. He was worried about his application to medical schools. Others have had to delete all their social media accounts after getting harassed and being told to kill themselves.

"It's a deliberate attempt to shut down dialogue on Palestinian issues," she said.

Canary Mission is not the only shadowy group online attempting to intimidate and silence college students. It's not the only organized effort that wants to equate criticism of Israeli policies with anti-Semitism.

Shaadie Ali, of Madison, Wisconsin, graduated last year from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a degree in geological engineering and geology. His name and photo appeared on the site after he attended a conference in 2017 on Students for Justice in Palestine. He did not speak at the conference.

"I was pretty shocked and freaked out and scared," he said. He was thinking about applying to law school and looking for jobs. The doxxing sites know how to use search engine optimization, so its listing is one of the first results on a student's name. His grandparents and uncles live in the West Bank, and he is afraid the Israeli government will deny him entry based on his name being on the anonymous site.

He, like Hurwitz, figured they would be fighting an expensive and losing battle to try to get their names removed.

"I'm going to let my actions speak for myself," Hurwitz said. "I try really hard to fight for what I believe in," she said. "I love being Jewish. I love my Jewish community. I love my people."

She was heartbroken that this personal attack came from within that same community. "The Jewish community can and should be better than this," she said. "I'm working toward that."

Recently, Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar rightly apologized for tweeting that U.S. support for pro-Israeli policies is "all about the Benjamins." Her tweet played into centuries of conspiracy theories about Jewish money corrupting Western politics, and she needed to become more aware of the damage in perpetuating these tropes. There are ways to argue for more just treatment in the Middle East without resorting to anti-Semitism.

It's also wrong to conflate any criticism of Israel, like Hurwitz's rejection of the Birthright trip or Ali's attendance at a conference, with anti-Semitism. And unlike an elected public official, these are students who face threats and loss of career opportunities. For all the conversation about conservative free speech being stifled on campuses and conservative students feeling unsafe about sharing their views, where is the chorus of voices condemning the shady tactics used by Canary Mission?

"A lot of people who hand-wring about free speech, they don't really care about this," Ali said. "Where were they when I got doxxed?"

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If you’ve never had the impulse to darken your face to mimic another race, blackface can seem archaic, part of a racist form of entertainment people engaged in long ago. Sadly, that’s pretty naive.

“Blackface, particularly in white sororities and fraternities, is as common as cheerleaders on a football field,” according to Lawrence Ross, author of “Blackballed: The Black and White Politics of Race on America’s Campuses.” Ross is talking about young people in this present moment. Not middle-aged or older people getting in trouble for decades-old racist acts. A Google search for college students and blackface will bring up plenty of contemporary examples, including the University of Oklahoma white sorority girl caught earlier this year on Snapchat in blackface saying what sounded like the n-word.

There is a strange yet enduring appeal to blackface and racist tropes among certain groups of white college students who presumably should know better. Blackface has dominated the headlines for the past several days. Ralph Northam, the Democratic governor of Virginia, is roiled by controversy for yearbook pictures of a person in blackface standing next to someone in Ku Klux Klan robes and hood. Mark Herring, the Democratic attorney general, also revealed he wore blackface at a college party in 1980. Last month, Michael Ertel, the Republican secretary of state in Florida, resigned after photos surfaced showing him in blackface dressed as a “Hurricane Katrina victim” at a party. But these incidents are hardly an aberration or spectacles from the past.

“Eighteen- to 21-year-olds reflect the racism in which they grow up,” Ross said. It’s ridiculous to think that colleges and universities are some sort of utopia, free from the prejudices of the past. Students who grow up in predominantly white neighborhoods, attend predominantly white schools and become members of predominantly white organizations can end up insulated from how certain actions impact others, particularly people of color.

“You feel like you are safe to do these things,” Ross said of those in a “whiteness cohort.” In his research, he discovered racist photos in college yearbooks everywhere. In one particular instance, the university refused to let him use a yearbook image in his book because the former student involved is a big donor. Among the recent examples, he cites Paige Shoemaker, a white former student at Kansas State University, who wore a dark clay facial mask, took a picture and captioned it “feels good to finally be a (racial slur)” before sharing it on social media. In her subsequent apology she said, “I am the furthest thing from racist.”

That’s a refrain that comes up frequently when white people apologize for racist statements and behaviors. There is a type of cognitive dissonance in which people believe themselves to be good and moral persons and also believe that people who participate in racist acts are only those who are morally bad. But it’s possible for people to say and do racist things even if they don’t harbor a hatred for people of color.

Another frequent rationalization is that the stunt was simply done in fun with a lack of awareness of how offensive it is. But the accompanying commentary (usually in the photo captions) and context of when blackface is used on college campuses shows that the wearer is displaying some level of contempt, degrading or mocking black people.

“You can feign ignorance and offer rationalizations if you believe you don’t need to be subject to understanding racism,” Ross said. People don’t like to look at racism as being baked into our society and institutions. “They look at it as an individual issue.”

And even in blackface, that individual is never part of the problem. Ross said that in his research of 700 colleges and universities over roughly 70 years, he wasn’t able to find a single instance of black students wearing whiteface to denigrate white people on St. Patrick’s Day.

Blackface says: These people are mockable. I can mock these people because I am in a position of power.

As recently as last fall, NBC host Megyn Kelly said on national TV that she didn’t see anything wrong with blackface as part of Halloween costumes. She later apologized. As far as consequences go, she walked away from her show with $30 million, the remainder of her $69 million contract.

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