The holidays can bring families together in ways that provoke unwanted drama. So, it can be helpful to structure some of that free time. The controlled chaos of family game night can provide a reprieve from boredom, chores and bickering.

We have an annual family tradition of testing a crop of new board games with our children in an extended family game night. And since our children have reached ages where spending time with family is far more enjoyable when their friends are also involved, this year, we invited our 17-year-old daughter’s friends to join us. Our 14-year-old son agreed to referee.

First, we attempted a board game inspired by internet searches. Autocomplete is designed for three to 10 players, ages 18 and up, although it seemed fine for younger teens, as well. The concept is simple: Two teams have one minute to guess the top 10 internet searches for a given prompt, read from a card. A judge keeps score while everyone yells out their guesses as fast as possible.

Feeling a little overconfident, my husband and I challenged our daughter and her two friends, while our son took on the role of judge. Once the card was read and the timer started, we started yelling out whatever came into our heads. The guesses were, at times, bizarre and nonsensical. Our son said it was often difficult to determine who gave an answer first, or which ones were being repeated. In a close call, Gen Z barely edged out Gen X for the win.

For the next challenge, we took on a social deduction game called The Chameleon. The game is designed for three to eight players, ages 14 and older.

In each round of play, a secret word is selected from a topic card. Everyone gets a code to figure out what the word is, except for the player who gets a chameleon card. When the round starts, every player has to quickly call out a word related to the secret word. The chameleon must bluff through this round. Once everyone has said a word, the players vote on who they think the chameleon is.

Everyone agreed that the accusation and guessing parts were the most enjoyable aspects of this game, but that the overall game was overly complicated.

We also had trouble figuring out the scoring mechanism, and what fun is a game if you can’t gloat about winning?

Our testers were just getting warmed up by this point, while the Olds were starting to lose steam. Fortunately, we were ready to test our final game, Blockbuster Party Game, which is designed for four or more players, ages 12 and up.

In this setup, teams compete to guess movie titles based on clues given in different ways, from one-word hints to charades. We split into two teams, and my husband and I claimed one of the teenage movie buffs for our team. This was a smart move. Otherwise, we would have been shut out.

In the first round, each team chose a person to go head-to-head in a quick-fire buzzer battle. Given categories like “Famous trilogies” and “Movies with a zombie in it,” these two players shouted out movie titles and slapped a buzzer. The first player to run out of ideas lost the round.

The winner from the face-off then picked three movie title cards. The player had to get their teammates to guess the title within 30 seconds using one of three techniques: acting out the plot, using a quote from the movie, or describing it in one word. The team that collects a film from every genre wins.

Those with extensive movie knowledge have a huge advantage. Our early recruitment strategy -- and collective years of movie-watching -- paid off, and the Olds, plus a movie-savvy teen, bested the Youths.

As we’ve learned over the years, there is an ideal moment to conclude game night: as soon as you can declare victory.

A Twitter user fired off a string of vulgar and bigoted tweets at 2:23 a.m.

I was tagged in one -- it was the kind of racist, expletive-ridden rant that’s a dime a dozen on social media. It was another post that caught my eye.

“We’ll get rid of her.” That’s how this poster responded to a congratulatory tweet about my sister’s election in Texas.

My sister is a sitting U.S. judge.

I reported the tweets and threat to Twitter and sent screenshots to my sister, who passed them along to law enforcement.

This came on the heels of reports that a Republican candidate in St. Petersburg, Florida, recently sent a fundraising email saying U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota, should be hanged. Omar’s Republican challenger in Minnesota was permanently suspended from Twitter for also suggesting the congresswoman should be tried for treason and hanged. Last month, Omar asked for leniency in the sentencing of a New York man who pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court for threatening to kill her.

Omar, like my family, is Muslim.

Outrage is too familiar a feeling on social media -- that flash of anger and disgust at the latest moral transgression, blatant lie or hypocrisy. Some exist in a constant state of outrage, while others profit from its peak production. The line between expressing moral outrage and threatening violence against political opponents, however, is getting blurrier in the digital age.

Yale psychology professor Molly Crockett has researched how expressions of moral outrage have changed over time. Expressing outrage is one way societies enforce social norms: by punishing and shaming those who violate those norms, she explained in a recent lecture. But the context of how this plays out online has rapidly evolved from earlier times.

Many adults and children may not realize that social networks, like Facebook and Twitter, are not neutral platforms. Their algorithms favor posts designed to provoke outrage -- regardless of whether the shared information is true. The truth is cast aside to maximize the number of users and the amount of time they spend on the site. If it’s likely to provoke you, you’re more likely to see it.

We are more frequently exposed to posts that support our own biases and worldviews and that are designed to trigger moral outrage. We’ve also learned that innumerable posts are deliberately created by bad actors who have a vested interest in spreading misinformation.

Crockett notes that the barriers to expressing outrage have greatly diminished online. It takes a few clicks on a keyboard behind the cloak of anonymity to attack another person. Psychologically, the user is rewarded by validation through likes or interaction, which can reinforce a habitual loop. Brain imaging and psychological studies show there’s something immediately satisfying about expressing outrage, Crockett said. This may help explain why some trolls linger on sites and feel compelled to post repeated negative comments expressing the same sentiments over and over.

In some cases, online moral outrage can be a force for positive social change. A recent example is Amazon’s decision to remove offensive Auschwitz-themed ornaments from its site after public backlash. But there’s also a significant corrosive and toxic element to it, and a numbing effect.

When the internet is always humming in the background, injecting little jots of outrage throughout the day, every day, it changes our society -- and it changes us.

When everything provokes outrage, it doesn’t work to prevent bad behavior anymore. Offenders are no longer shamed. And, nowadays, when you share outrage, you’re largely preaching to the choir, since so many users filter their information sources based on what they already believe.

It’s a dilemma for those of us who rely on digital platforms to stay informed and connected. We don’t want to become numb to corruption, bigotry and injustice. The expression of moral outrage feels satisfying because it is also an indicator of what you care about, what your values and priorities are and a way to signal that to others. Yet, the consequences for being steeped in moral outrage on a regular basis are unclear. Could these feedback loops and biochemical rewards to outrage expression rewire the brain?

Threats of violence against political opponents is a sign that something’s seriously gone wrong.

I couldn’t remember the name of a woman I needed to contact, so I typed a few keywords in the search bar of my Gmail account. This is my failsafe way of turning up old contacts.

Nothing at all came back. That was weird; I clearly remembered our correspondence from a few years ago.

Then, I noticed something even stranger. My inbox said it had around 12,000 messages. Unless it’s spam or ads, I haven’t deleted an email from this account in 13 years. My inbox should have more than 75,000 read messages.

What was going on?

I filtered the emails by date. There was nothing before 2017.

A deep sense of panic washed over me. Much of my work, contacts, personal and professional history lives in email. How did 60,000 emails just disappear?

It got worse.

I noticed my drafts folder was missing about 400 messages. Whenever I need to jot down interviews, observations or ideas I plan to use later, I start a draft email with a specific subject line. I started doing it more than a decade ago.

We can all agree that this is a terrible system. But I did not expect it to vanish into thin air one day.

I frantically emailed whatever contacts for Google I could find. While I waited for a response, I told my co-workers, fellow journalists who also traffic in hundreds of emails a day, that most of my digital record-keeping had mysteriously disappeared. Their faces registered the shock I felt, but then they reassured me that, surely, everything would be recovered. We live in the Age of The Cloud. Nothing is ever deleted from the internets.

I wanted to believe them, but in my sinking heart, I knew this was the curse that has haunted me.

I’ve been a saver (some might use a stronger word that rhymes with “boarder”) of written material my entire life -- letters, notes, cards, books, journals. Growing up, I kept a box in the garage filled with letters from my grandfather, notes folded into complicated shapes from my best friends in middle school and even Valentines from grade school. The summer before my senior year of high school, lightning struck our house and burned down the garage. Those letters turned to ash.

I restarted my collection of written memorabilia and again accumulated boxes in my parents’ garage -- yearbooks, letters, college term papers, grad school research. After the boxes collected dust for years, my father asked if I could please take my papers home. I mailed two large boxes from Texas to Missouri. A month later, I received a letter informing me that the boxes had been destroyed in a processing facility in Atlanta.

The curse.

This Gmail account had become the digital version of those boxes.

It was just a matter of time, I figured.

Maybe I should burn some sage to remove this hex, I suggested to a colleague.

Maybe you should go to the Apple store and see if their geniuses can help you, he said.

That sounded like a better plan. Oddly enough, my missing drafts were showing up on my iPhone’s Gmail app, though I wasn’t able to open them.

I headed to the mall, carrying my history like an albatross. Even the geniuses were stumped by my email apocalypse. Had someone hacked my account? Was there a problem with Gmail’s server? They had no explanation, and suggested I try to contact Google again.

I headed home dejected.

Nonetheless, I called Google support and a gentleman said he would send me a recovery link that would attempt to restore everything that had been deleted in the past 30 days.

A glimmer of hope.

Of course, the recovery link refused to launch. I should have accepted this fate hours ago.

I tried one last time. This time, it went through.

The rep said it might take up to 24 hours to recover the account, and that it wasn’t guaranteed to work. I turned off my computer and went to bed.

I had a nightmare of being kidnapped. As soon as I woke up, I logged in to my account.

By God, the emails now went back to 2015. They were coming back from the ether.

Bit by bit, the lost years started reappearing. By the next day, I had more than 76,000 emails back in my account, and all 700 drafts were also restored.

I still don’t know what happened or why, but I’m not one to question miracles.

Perhaps the curse is finally broken.