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Our review of We Own This City, the new TV series from The Wire's David Simon

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The origins of the folk traditions of May Day

Ancient origins

May Day, like most folklore customs, has its roots in the Dark Ages. The ancient Celts divided the year into four major festivals – Samhain (October 31st – November 1st), Imbolic (February 1st), Beltane (May 1st) and Lughnasadh (August 1st). Beltane, a Celtic word meaning ‘the fire (or fires) of Bel’ marked the beginning of summer for the Celts. The festival celebrated the coming of longer, lighter days, the rebirth and renewal of spring, and the hope for a plentiful harvest in the year ahead. Beltane is still celebrated throughout the UK today, though it is now better known as May 1st or May Day.

‘Heathenish vanity’ and pagan superstitions

The most well-known of Oxford’s May Day traditions is of course, Magdalen College’s choir singing Hymnus Eucharisticus from the top of Magdalen Tower at 6am to waiting crowds below. This tradition, however, has only been documented from about 1674 and marking May Day in Oxford goes back much further than that. More detail on Magdalen College’s role in the celebrations can be found on the Museum of Oxford blog here.

Pre-Christian traditions and pagan superstitions particularly relating to nature, still had a strong influence in the Middle Ages. The earliest accounts of Maytime celebrations mainly refer to ‘bringing in the May’ which is when people would go out into the fields and countryside to gather flowers and greenery to decorate their homes and other buildings. Green has long been associated with life and rebirth, which is embodied by The Green Man, an ancient pagan figure representing fertility and growth. A central figure in May Day celebrations throughout Northern and Central Europe, he is the male counterpart of the May Queen, and is often portrayed with acorns and hawthorn leaves, medieval symbols of fertility associated with spring.

If you look closely, the Green Man pops up all over Oxford and Oxfordshire, in churches, on college buildings and in street architecture. The Green Man features in churches as symbol of rebirth and resurrection, key ideas in Christianity, and serves as an example of how images from the ‘old religion’ were brought into medieval churches to tie them to the Christian faith.

Jules, Luke and Pete are here to survey the respective car-crashes that were Man United’s trip to the Emirates and Jules’ Saturday night appearance on Pointless!

We kick off with the Merseyside derby as Everton sink deeper into the quagmire while Burnley and Mike Jackson moonwalk all over it. Elsewhere, Paul Scholes lands Jesse Lingard in bother, Jorginho takes one of the worst penalties in Premier League history, and things take a turn on Planet Mark McGhee!

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How the visionary work of Guo Pei was shaped by ancestry and fantasy

Nearly two years after George Floyd’s murder sparked nationwide protests, Democratic mayors who once seemed sympathetic to reducing police brutality are now, more and more, pointing to law enforcement as a solution to the rising community gun violence around the country. New York’s Eric Adams, San Francisco’s London Breed, and Chicago’s Lori Lightfoot are among those who increasingly seem to be leaning on cops to stop shootings. “It’s time that the reign of criminals who are destroying our city…come to an end,” Breed said in a news conference in December, vowing more aggressive policing.

But a major new study—highlighted this weekend by the Chicago Sun-Times—provides some of the best evidence yet that these mayors should not turn their backs on other, non-policing solutions to gun violence. University of Chicago researchers looked at a mentoring program that serves men with extensive rap sheets who are at a high risk of shooting someone or being shot. During the 18-month READI Chicago program, the men, many of whom have been shot in the past, are paid $15 an hour to join daily job training and counseling sessions, activities that can get them off the streets and help them support their families without throwing them in jail.

The results have been impressive. The researchers followed 2,500 men who participated in the intensive program. This group was two-thirds less likely to be arrested for a shooting or homicide than a similar group of men who didn’t participate. The results were even more astonishing for guys who’d been recruited to the program by outreach workers: Their arrests dropped nearly 80 percent. And they were half as likely to be shot and killed themselves. That’s a lot of impact for a program that costs about 1 percent of what the city of Chicago typically spends on policing.

The study is particularly exciting because of the rigor with which it was conducted. It was a randomized trial, which means it was the first one of its kind to examine a large group of men from an anti-violence program with the same degree of statistical precision that you’d see in a study to evaluate medical treatments. “These are significant results,” Roseanna Ander, executive director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, which conducted the study and helped develop the READI curriculum, told the Sun-Times. And perhaps the Biden administration is paying attention: It recently invited Eddie Bocanegra, who helps lead READI, to serve as a special advisor on gun violence.

When I saw the Chicago study, I couldn’t help but think of a similar mentoring program in Oakland, California, that I examined in 2020. I followed Andre Reed, a thirtysomething man with a lengthy criminal record who had been referred to the Community & Youth Outreach program after he was shot eight times. The program paired him up with a life coach, Leonard Haywood, who helped him turn his life around and became a close friend.

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