It me. I'm Collin. Shockingly, I hate talking about myself but here are the CliffsNotes. 32, Texan turned cruise ship character turned Texan turned Chicagoan turned Texan. Event designer and planner. Interior designer and stylist. Corporate badass. Spotify playlist-makin' fiend. Fiancé and double dog dad. Cursed with an aggressive gluten intolerance but also a passion for bread and no f*cks to give. Why a newsletter? It gives me a creative outlet with a deadline and my therapist says these things are important. Plus, I love to read, shop, share, and most importantly spend time on the internet. I don't sleep.

P.S. We are a few weeks from The Collective's first birthday and I would love your feedback. Are you a loyal reader? Do you only care for the shopping recommendations? Does it get automatically deleted? Please click here to take an anonymous survey or just reply to this email with your feedback.I've decided to double down and I am actively working to improve The Collective and increase readership.

The pop star wants to live on her own terms. To do that, she had to give one more brutal performance. [Britney's testimony is really powerful - I recommend listening to the audio rather than reading the transcript.]

"If we zoom out for a moment, however, the story doesn’t add up. If Black and Brown trans women are the most oppressed in our communities today, just as they were in 1969, yet they have also held the keys to revolution this whole time, why has nothing materially changed? After 50 years of Pride, why are its apparent figureheads still imperiled? What’s missing from the frame?"

"It’s noon in Los Angeles toward the end of the Plague Year, and I’m lounging on the patio of a swanky three-floor mansion, watching a scrum of teenage boys perform trending TikTok dances. Arranged in a tidy delta formation near the jacuzzi and pool, the five boys smile into the glare of a ring light, at the center of which is affixed a smartphone recording their moves. These boys possess a teenybopper cuteness and, because they’re between the ages of eighteen and twenty, they have noisomely strong metabolisms and thus go shirtless pretty much all of the time, displaying either the ectomorphic thinness of trees or greyhounds or, in one boy’s case especially, the sharply delineated musculature of a really big insect. They bite their lower lips, and their expressions are—I’m sorry, there’s no other way to describe them—precoital."

The Nazi regime preached an ideology of physical, mental, and moral purity. Yet as Norman Ohler reveals in this gripping new history, the Third Reich was saturated with drugs: cocaine, opiates, and, most of all, methamphetamines, which were consumed by everyone from factory workers to housewives to German soldiers. In fact, troops were encouraged, and in some cases ordered, to take rations of a form of crystal meth—the elevated energy and feelings of invincibility associated with the high even help to account for the breakneck invasion that sealed the fall of France in 1940, as well as other German military victories. Hitler himself became increasingly dependent on injections of a cocktail of drugs—ultimately including Eukodal, a cousin of heroin—administered by his personal doctor.

Today’s gay youth have dozens of queer peer heroes, both fictional and real, but former gay teenager Grace Perry did not have that luxury. Instead, she had to search for queerness in the (largely straight) teen cultural phenomena the aughts had to offer: in Lindsay Lohan’s fall from grace, Gossip Girl, Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl,” country-era Taylor Swift, and Seth Cohen jumping on a coffee cart. And, for better or worse, these touch points shaped her adult identity. She came out on the other side like many millennials did: in her words, gay as hell.

"There’s surely some Beverly Hillbillies quip that pertains to the home that actors Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis have built on a glorious hilltop site perched above the storied Los Angeles enclave. After all, the high-powered Hollywood transplants—he’s from Iowa; she was born in Ukraine—dug a well on the property to irrigate the land, planted (and harvested) a field of corn during the COVID lockdown, and dubbed the place KuKu Farms."

"Like so many of my summer recipes, this was created out of an urgent need to feed a large group of hungry friends on Fire Island. It's now tradition to rent a house on Fire Island during the summer, and I of course insist on being in charge of the kitchen. I am that mom who finds washing dishes closer to the ocean and staring out the window longingly as I scrub relaxing." [I LOVE this salad and it's so simple!]

"One of the hardest sacrifices I made was suspending my Netflix subscription. (I love my shows!) But with those extra nine bucks a month, I was able to build up my savings, and then have my parents write me a check for ten percent above the asking price."