Deep Read with Phoebe Lovatt

Find Deep Reading lists at phoebe.substack.com

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Sandeep Salter is a friend who is like family to me — we met on the first day of secondary school in London and I spent a considerable chunk of my teenage years in her family home. She has lived in New York since her university days, and her CV is a Google Map of the most distinctive independent businesses in the city: Printed Matter, McNally Jackson, Goods for the Study, Picture Room, and now Salter House — the family brand she runs with her husband Carson, which is best known for the cotton nightdresses that inspired a thousand imitators.

In this conversation, we talk about the discipline that comes with growing up as the child of dancers, the efficiency of feeling genuinely comfortable in your own skin, and Sandeep's commitment to building something at her own pace in a city that champions speed above all else.

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@phoebelovatt

@deepread.phoebelovatt

@salter.house

Lydia Pang is the co-founder of creative agencies MØRNING and EVENING, and the author of Eat Bitter: A Story About Guts, and Food — a memoir in eight recipes about fertility loss, relationship struggles, and burnout induced by over a decade of working herself into the ground.

She's also someone who has spent her career branding other people, which makes her examination of her own long-suppressed vulnerability especially compelling. We talked about the mythology of New York, the tension between creative purity and commercial survival, and what it means to write a book like no-one's reading.

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Deep Reading lists can be found at phoebe.substack.com

@phoebelovatt

@deepread.phoebelovatt

@lydia_pang_

Deep Read #51 is with New York-based author Stephanie Wambugu. Her debut novel Lonely Crowds centres on the intense bond between two young women, Ruth and Maria, who meet at a Catholic girls’ school in Rhode Island and remain entangled in one another’s lives into adulthood.

We spoke about the discomfort of ugly emotions, the dangers of ‘staying too long at the fair’, and the realities of navigating artistic ambition while trying to establish stability, intimacy, and a truly “adult” life.

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@phoebelovatt

@deepread.phoebelovatt

@stephaniejeriwambugu

Zakia Sewell is a broadcaster, DJ and writer, and the author of a remarkable new book, Finding Albion: Myth, Folklore and the Quest for a Hidden Britain.

In this conversation we talk about national identity, immigration, paganism, Notting Hill Carnival, radical histories, British humour, and what happens when love of place is ceded entirely to the right.

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Deep Reading Lists are available at phoebe.substack.com

@phoebelovatt

@deepread.phoebelovatt

@zzzakia

Find Deep Reading lists for each episode at phoebe.substack.com

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Deep Read #49 is with Annie Kreighbaum, a creative director and beauty-world architect who helped shape Glossier in its defining era and is now building KRAUM, a brand that begins with five exquisitely small makeup brushes made to her exacting specifications in Japan — what she half-jokingly calls a “vanity project,” for reasons that become clear as we talk. We revisit the optimism and extravagant funding energy of 2016, and the skills she honed in that moment — instinct, language, taste, and the discipline of editing — before turning to the bigger thesis behind KRAUM: not just better tools, but a slower, more intentional approach to getting ready. We also discuss fast beauty, permanence, her resistance to AI as a shortcut in creative work, and the books that shape her thinking.

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@phoebelovatt

@deepread.phoebelovatt

@annieokay

@kraum.co