Smarty Pants From The American Scholar

We take our muscles for granted: every time we step or stand—or even fall asleep!—we are experiencing a complex system of muscles moving in concert. And yet our notion of strength is still bogged down in stereotypes and preconceptions, some of them holdovers from 2,000 years ago. In our Spring 2025 issue, Michael Joseph Gross wrote about how the ancient Greeks perceived strength—and muscles themselves—in an entirely different way than we do. This week, Gross joins us to talk about his new book, Stronger: The Untold Story of Muscle in Our Lives, which looks at weight training through historical, social, and medical lenses to show its transformative power over time. His guides are leading scholars in the intersecting fields of kinesiology, classics, gender studies, and medicine, whose work has been shifting the narrative about strength for more than half a century.Go beyond the episode:Michael Joseph Gross’s Stronger: The Untold Story of Muscle in Our LivesRead an excerpt, “Mr. Olympia,” from our Spring 2025 Is