Selected Press

The New York Times

“She does not promise the secret to washboard abs or a slimmer waist, as many fitness influencers do. Ms. Johnston, instead, provides her 34,000-plus Instagram followers and nearly 25,000 subscribers to her She’s a Beast newsletter with the tools to build a body that can more seamlessly move through everyday life. And she writes sharp, incisive takes on modern discourse surrounding fitness, eating and other related subjects.”

GQ Profile

“In a deeper way, though, Johnston thinks building strength is a way to create an entirely different kind of relationship with your body. When tackling some of the thorniest questions in fitness—should I be doing cardio? Should I be eating carbs? What should my body look like?—the answer for Johnston can almost always come from asking “What would help you get stronger?” It’s the key that opens every door. And so when a reader asked, after Kate Moss, whether anything tastes as good as skinny feels, Johnston was ready: ‘Being strong feels better than skinny feels.’

“While there are plenty of posts auditing the too-good-to-be-true claims of fitness influencers and the weight-loss industry, the core message of her project has been metronome-consistent: demystifying weight training for people who aren’t in the conventional meathead demographic, and then convincing them to train (and eat) like a bit of a meathead anyway.”

—Chris Cohen, Why Lifting Weights Is For Everyone

 

Podcast appearance //

Why Is This Happening? With Chris Hayes

“I want there to be a sort of progressive, left space of workout meatheads that doesn’t exist. But the closest thing I’ve found is the writer who is our guest today. Her name is Casey Johnston, and she wrote this column that I started reading (which is very funny) called Ask A Swole Woman, that has now moved over to her Substack, which is called She’s A Beast… she’s one of the few people I’ve found who is fusing a genuine pure love of and enthusiasm for weight lifting—not as a gross culturally overdetermined activity, but actually a sort of restorative one, physically, mentally, and spiritually—with incisive cultural commentary and criticism of how weird the world the around all this stuff is.”

—Chris Hayes, Why Is This Happening?

Podcast appearance

Longform #464, Casey Johnston

”I feel more comfortable lately with a sort of beloved-local-restaurant level of success. What's nice about Substack is that we've come to this place, that I hope lasts, where we can have this sort of local-restaurant relationship with writers, or I can have that with readers, where I don't have to be part of this big machine in order to do something that I really like.”

Listen

Other Selected Appearances and Features

In addition to profiles and guest spots, Casey is a regular featured expert on science, health, and fitness for outlets including the New York Times, NPR, Slate, The Atlantic, and Channel Q.