Ben Mattlin — Unbound: Notes from a Reluctant Disability Activist - with Joel Michael Reynolds

 Ben Mattlin was born in 1962 with spinal muscular atrophy, a congenital and progressive neuromuscular weakness. He never stood or walked but grew up expecting a normal life. In this book of essays, he chronicles that life and also charts his growth as a reluctant disability activist and public intellectual.Mattlin's disability was from birth. Raised in a family that insisted that he be educated in a mainstream setting, he never thought about his disability as being an obstacle until adulthood. It was not until he had graduated from Harvard and could not find a job that he began to understand what disability rights activists were talking about.These collected short pieces chronicle Mattlin's intellectual coming-of-age including his beginnings, difficult conversations about disability, the social aspects of being disabled in a nondisabled world, and a wider perspective as the author looks back on his sixty years of disability. The book contains a variety of essays intermixed with a few edited podcast transcripts. Some of the pieces are deeply personal; others are stridently political. All of them are guaranteed to make readers see life and the world in a new way.Altogether, this collection is a frank, unsentimental examination of some of the most important and moving issues of our day--always rendered with intelligence, sensitivity, and a liberal sprinkling of humor.PURCHASE BOOK: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781958888520?ic_referral=zkYDaU159XUgLzWpN7rkrpqablYl6gd4hCP6uD-3M3MwM9GKqzJ9QGCFeW3cuOuxmqbOCPUV59WcGUa0F-F2NYy5qAKqdDXwIF2tOx1C9IaNtT_zDh4zpIArd82468qQF0uykEcBen Mattlin is freelance writer and the author of four books: Unbound: Notes from a Reluctant Disability Activist (2025), Disability Pride: Dispatches from a Post-ADA World (2022), In Sickness and in Health: Love, Disability, and a Quest to Understand the Perils and Pleasures of Interabled Romance (2018), and Miracle Boy Grows Up: How the Disability Rights Revolution Saved My Sanity (2012). A Harvard graduate, Mattlin has published essays in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and Time, and he's been featured on NPR, "Here & Now," NowThis News, ABC's Prime Time Live, CNN, E! Entertainment Network, and independent radio stations across the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, and they have two grown daughters.Mattlin will be in conversation with Joel Michael Reynolds, a Senior Research Scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Disability Studies, and Director of the Disability Studies Program at Georgetown University. They are jointly appointed as Faculty in the Department of Family Medicine as well as in the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics at Georgetown University School of Medicine and Medical Center. Reynolds is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Journal of Philosophy of Disability, co-founder and co-editor of the book series Oxford Studies in Disability, Ethics, and Society, and President of the Society for Philosophy and Disability. Their most recent books include The Life Worth Living: Disability, Pain, and Morality and The Art of Flourishing: Conversations on Disability.