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[Introduction] Hello and welcome to my podcast. I am Chinmay and I will be the host for this podcast(enthusiastic tone for this part).

To give a brief background about myself, I was born and raised in India. To be a bit more specific, I am from Mumbai. Mumbai is a city that is known for having the world’s most expensive house as well as Asia’s largest slum. Sounds very messed up, right? But that is the reality. Also, talking about slums brings me to the social issue that I had selected as my topic for the previous English assignment, and that is poverty. The definition of poverty is that it is a phenomenon in which a person or a household cannot afford or doesn’t possess the basic, necessary stuff required to live. Now, the reason why I chose this topic for the assignment is because of how omnipresent the social issue really is. An example of this is right here in downtown Atlanta, where poverty is visible in the form of homeless people. Also, not to mention how poverty is the main cause of other social issues such as homelessness, malnutrition, depression, etc. So, now that we have established some context for the podcast, let’s move on to talking about the “why” of this podcast.

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My intention of making this podcast is to provide an insight as to how the readings and learnings from this semester’s English classes have helped me in approaching my social issue topic. This semester, we had a bunch of readings from authors including Tolentino, Heinrichs, etc. Each of them had a significant contribution to my process of choosing the social issue as well as structuring the assignments. One of the learnings that had the most impact on the way I structured my sentences as well as the paragraphs, was (I would be quoting the learning after going through it so that I don’t misphrase anything. It was about how the paragraph should start with the basic, easy-to-understand stuff and then gradually move towards covering that topic in-depth. This way, it would be much easier for the reader to understand the topic of the paragraph, even if they aren’t an expert in that topic).

Selecting, skimming as well as summarizing scholarly articles was one of the requirements for the assignment. I did that for about 4 scholarly articles(at this point, I would be introducing the articles and their authors). All of these scholarly articles were, more or less, talking about the following two things: poverty and its impact on the United States.

(This part, in the final script, would consist of me talking about my research process as well as how I was able to counter some of the biases that I had)

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So, all in all, the learnings played a crucial role in guiding me throughout the research as well as the writing process. (I am planning to talk a bit more about the learnings, in this part. I still haven’t thought this through yet)

That is it from my side. Thanks a lot for tuning in to my podcast.

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Poverty, by definition, is when someone cannot afford to buy, or doesn’t possess, resources that are considered essential in a person’s life. Examples of such resources include food, potable water, shelter to live in, etc.

Poverty caught everyone’s attention and once again became an important social issue during the Covid-19 pandemic when unemployment had reached a record high. Because of unemployment, many people lost their sources of income, which then pushed many of them into poverty. Governments did try their best at using various economic policies to reduce unemployment, but till now, no government has even been successful at completely eradicating poverty.

A snip from Poverty in America Documentary 2017 on YouTube

The reason why I chose poverty as the topic for this assignment is because of how deadly it can be. Poverty can have detrimental, physical as well as mental, effects on the person that is experiencing it. Having little or no food for many days or being deprived of water during the summer can take a huge toll on any person’s body. Also, poverty can lead to other social issues such as homelessness, malnutrition, etc.

For this major assignment, I have chosen 3 scholarly articles and 1 easily verifiable article by a news agency. The 3 scholarly articles discuss poverty in the United States, with each of them analyzing a different aspect of poverty.

The scholarly article by David Brady and Zachary Parolin discusses extreme and deep poverty, two terms that describe the worst variations of poverty. The article also analyzes multiple data points and tries to estimate the number of people living in deep and extreme poverty in the United States. The second scholarly article by Navarro Carlos Gayán and other authors tries to find out the determinants of poverty in the United States. The authors try to present a view that determining the causes of poverty would be of no use if there is no action taken to affect those causes. They provide many determinants of poverty by analyzing data over a period of time and then concluding based on the analysis. The scholarly article by Jeremiah Bohr and Anna C. McCreery talks about energy bills and how they contribute to poverty. They discuss various factors that determine the energy bill and how that can lead families into economic poverty. The easily verifiable article’s role in this assignment is to act as a reliable source of information that strengthens the topic by talking about the impact of Covid-19 on the people who were already living in poverty. 

For the formatting, I would be referring to the Purdue OWL as well as to the Page Formatting Worksheet. In addition to that, I would also be referring to Dr. Fentem’s Style Preferences. For sentence structuring, I would be using the Expository Writing Okay and Good Examples as a guide.

There are two major problems that I have faced till now while working on the assignment: sentence structuring and reaching the 1000-word limit. For sentence structuring, the problem for me is to not give out my opinion. As this is an expository essay, I have to restrict myself to only giving out facts and explanations, and not opinions. This is a bit difficult as I have to check every sentence I write and make sure that it contains no opinion. The second problem is related to the first problem. Because I am very critical about the sentences I write, I end up having to edit or delete some of them, which reduces the word count of the article.  

Poverty is defined as being in a state such that a person doesn’t have or cannot afford to have the necessities. Throughout the world, developed countries usually tend to have a lesser percentage of their population under poverty, whereas developing and under-developed nations tend to have a huge portion of their population living under poverty. Minorities are the ones who live in poverty, especially in developed countries.

To measure and compare poverty between multiple nations, there are various indexes that decide how severe poverty is. One such index is called the Human Poverty Index. It was developed by United Nations, in addition to the Human Development Index. There is another index, whose data is comparable to the international standards, called Multidimensional Poverty Index. These indexes are often compared with other countries’ data to see which country has reduced the percentage of people living in poverty.

Cited below are some of the scholarly articles that I would be annotating for the second major assignment:

1) O’Connor, Alice. “When Measurements Matter: Poverty, Wealth, and the Politics of Inequality in the United States.” History of Political Economy, Duke University Press, 1 June 2020, read.dukeupress.edu/hope/article-abstract/52/3/589/160604/When-Measurements-Matter-Poverty-Wealth-and-the.

Notes– The article compares the economic inequality situation in the 1960s with the current times. It argues how there was poverty, back in the day, but the situation was misrepresented for the public. It also talks about the War on Poverty, an unofficial term for a legislation in the 1960s. 

This scholarly article is slightly difficult to compress into 3 main sentences, mainly because it has a lot of information that seems relevant to the topic and hence filtering that information is the difficult part.

2) Gayán, Navarro, Carlos, et al. “An Assessment of Poverty Determinants in U.S. Census Tracts, 1970–2010.” Growth & Change, vol. 51, no. 3, Sept. 2020, pp. 977–999. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1111/grow.12389.

Notes– This article argues that finding the causes of poverty is necessary to fight poverty but not sufficient enough. The authors support their arguments by comparing various statistics of the MSAs(Metropolitan Statistical Areas) of the US and saying that poverty tends to be higher near the center of MSA, while near the suburbs, the poverty is relatively low.  

It isn’t that difficult to summarize the main points of this scholarly article into 3 sentences as the arguments presented by the authors are pretty clear and easy to comprehend, except for one point and that is the tabular data is a bit difficult to analyze.

3) Bohr, Jeremiah, and Anna C McCreery. “Do Energy Burdens Contribute to Economic Poverty in the United States? A Panel Analysis.” Social Forces, vol. 99, no. 1, 1 Sept. 2020, pp. 155–177., doi:10.1093/sf/soz131.

Notes- This article tries to find out whether or not electricity consumption is a determinant of poverty by focusing on a certain group of people who spend 10% or more, of their income, on heating and energy. The authors used data on energy consumption from 1999-2017 and found out that those who were energy-burdened had a higher chance of staying in poverty.

It wasn’t that difficult to compress this article mainly because the sentences were easy to understand as well as the data, table, and analysis were presented in such a way that it made it quite easy for me to interpret it.

https://create.piktochart.com/output/56017176-de-extinction-of-woolly-mammoths

A mammoth replica on display at the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, Canada

A biosciences company, Colossal Laboratories, has plans to bring back the extinct species of Woolly Mammoths to life. Recently, they have been in the news for bagging $15 million in initial funding from investors, who believe in Colossal’s vision. Something that was previously only possible in fiction, is being experimented on in real life. But a project, with many difficulties, be really feasible and if yes, what could be the potential consequences?

The project first made headlines in 2017, when George Church, a renowned geneticist at Harvard, presented the idea of bringing back Woolly Mammoths using their DNA, which was preserved and frozen. The frozen DNA would then be injected into an Asian elephant, which would then have similar traits to the woolly mammoth. The scientists also predict that a potential benefit of this project would be that it would help reverse the effects of climate change. But that claim isn’t completely supported by evidence and hence could be thought of as something which the scientists added to make their project more appealing. 

George Church, a renowned geneticist, working at Harvard

Once the first mammoth looks and behaves similar to the scientists’ expectation, they plan to clone it in a similar way to Dolly, the Sheep. And once that project is successful, which, as per estimates, might take about a decade, the scientists have planned to use the same engineering technology to try and revive other extinct species. It might also be that the same technology could be used on other animals to modify their genes so that they can evolve at a similar speed to what their habitats are evolving at.

But some questions about this project still remain unanswered. The main one being that is the project really worth the effort, time, and money. A decade worth of time and millions of dollars are being spent on reviving a species that really have no positive impact on Earth. Even without their existence, the current food chain and ecosystem are in perfect balance. But there is a chance that their addition to the current food chain, could cause an imbalance, which might take decades to correct. Another part is that due to the news being very appealing to a huge audience, it is being circulated at a very fast pace on various news sites and social media. The problem due to that is that majority of the people only know some part of the story. Many ethicists are concerned about the project being unethical due to various reasons(one of them being that the species might be invasive in the ecosystem and the imbalance can cost everyone, including humans). This might not only affect the scientists associated with the project, but it might also cause a financial loss to the stakeholders, who are involved in the project.

Some relevant points about the news story, which audiences need to be careful about are:

1. Historical results cannot be used as the basis for future projects. Just because a project, which used a certain process, was successful in the past doesn’t mean that the results for any other future projects, which use a similar process, would also be the same(fallacy of antecedent).
2. Unsupported, connected claims- Be careful about certain claims, which experts assert, that are connected with one another but do not have any strong reasoning or logic to support them(slippery slope fallacy).
3. Be sure to check the credibility of a person- Just because a person is an expert in a certain field doesn’t mean that their comment on any topic will be credible. For example, an economics professor at Harvard University isn’t credible enough to comment on the efficacy of Covid vaccines(fallacy of power).  
4. Perspective- Authors try to dominate the discussion by focusing on what they think is right. They can do this by ignoring counter-arguments from their writing. This influences your opinion, as a reader, and hence be careful of this point(framing).
5. Wordplay– Authors use certain words or phrases to affect the hearts of the reader. This is an easy way to influence the readers’ minds(pathos).

The addition of an extinct species, back into the ecosystem, might be something that is very exciting to think about. This project is proof that shows how science has evolved over the years and now is at a stage where we are attempting something which we never imagined we could do. So, I only hope that this project doesn’t end like Jurassic Park! 

Bibliography

1. https://www.deseret.com/u-s-world/2021/9/16/22675606/bitcoin-billionaires-woolly-mammoths-climate-change
2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2021/09/16/woolly-mammoth-extinct-science-dna/
3. https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/fall-2021/deextinction-revive-ancient-endangered-species-woolly-mammoths-passenger-pigeons