It’s more than just the cracking textures that sets this slaw apart, says Tom Kerridge in “The BBQ Book“. I use cabbage, carrots and red onion, but also throw in heaps of kale because I love its iron-y flavour. The addition of toasted hazelnuts and the tangy, lush dressing makes each bite special.

Ingredients

• 250g bunch of curly kale, stems removed
• 3 tbsp white-wine vinegar
• 1⁄4 red cabbage (150g)
• 1⁄4 white cabbage (150g)
• 2 large carrots
• 1 large red onion, halved and thinly sliced
• a large handful of flat-leaf parsley, roughly chopped
• a large handful of dill, roughly chopped
• 100g toasted hazelnuts, roughly chopped
• salt and freshly ground pepper

  For the dressing:

• 100ml soured cream
• 100ml natural yogurt
• 2 tsp Dijon mustard
• 2 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
• juice of 1 lemon

Method

• Shred the kale leaves and place in a large bowl. Trickle over the wine vinegar and sprinkle lightly with salt. Massage the leaves with your hands for a couple of minutes to tenderise the kale.
• Finely shred the red and white cabbage and immerse in a bowl of iced water for 5 minutes or so to crisp up.
• Cut the carrots into fine julienne strips and add to the kale with the sliced onion and chopped herbs.
• Drain the cabbage thoroughly in a colander and pat dry with a clean tea towel. Add the cabbage to the other veg.
• For the dressing, put all the ingredients into a bowl and season with salt and pepper. Whisk together to combine.
• Pour the dressing over the kale slaw and mix well until everything is evenly coated. Add three-quarters of the toasted hazelnuts and mix through.
• Transfer the slaw to a serving bowl, scatter over the remaining toasted hazelnuts and serve.

Sign up for The Week’s Food & Drink newsletter for recipes, reviews and recommendations.

The Trump administration has declared war on America’s universities, said Jeannie Suk Gersen in The New Yorker. Last month, the Department of Education wrote to 60 of them warning that they faced being stripped of federal funding if they did not do more to protect Jewish students on campus. Then it withheld billions in funding and research grants from Columbia, Princeton, Cornell and Northwestern, in an apparent effort to force them into compliance.

Columbia has since agreed to make a range of changes – including bringing in a new internal security force, and banning the wearing of face masks for the purposes of concealing identity. But last week, Harvard, America’s oldest university, became the first to say that it would not be bowing to the administration’s demands – citing the right of private institutions to determine their own teaching and hiring practices. The administration promptly froze more than $2 billion in grants to the Ivy League college and threatened to revoke its tax-exempt status. Harvard is now suing it in response.

Harvard had no choice but to stand firm, said Musa al-Gharbi in The Washington Post. Columbia’s partial concessions haven’t got it anywhere: its funding is still frozen. And Harvard couldn’t possibly have complied with all the administration’s demands, which include “reducing the power” of staff who seem “more committed to activism than scholarship”; hiring staff and admitting students based on merit alone; screening international applicants to root out those who may be “hostile to American values”; and submitting to an external audit of students and staff to ensure “viewpoint diversity”. The administration says it is simply trying to force the university to uphold civil rights, said Thomas Chatterton Williams in The Atlantic. But its real aim is “to bring Harvard to heel”, as part of its efforts to subdue those institutions that might challenge Trump’s agenda.

The public may side with Trump in this clash, said Evan Mandery in Politico. Harvard is widely regarded as a bastion of unacceptable privilege, owing to the way it offers preferential access to the children of alumni. This policy does help perpetuate inequality, said Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times. And some of Trump’s other beefs with elite universities are also valid: “there is a strain of antisemitism” among some left-wing academics, and a lack of ideological diversity in some academic departments. But this does not justify this attack on the universities’ independence. Harvard is protected by its $53.2 billion endowment, but the federal funding freeze will hurt it – and not only it: most of the frozen funds pay for research work at its medical school.

Trump should trust the market to protect academic freedom, said Carine Hajjar in The Boston Globe. Dismayed by last year’s pro-Gaza encampments, and students spouting pro-Hamas rhetoric, donors had already “wreaked havoc on Harvard’s bottom line by withdrawing donations”. And Harvard had been taking steps to change its culture. Trump’s heavy-handed tactics risk killing off these reforms.

Worse, they risk damaging the reputation of America’s higher-education sector, said Catherine Rampell in The Washington Post. Fees from foreign students generated more money for the US last year than natural gas and coal combined. The US’ ability to attract international academic talent has helped put it at the cutting edge of scientific research and generates a wealth of soft power. But “what international student in their right mind” will want to study in the US now, when officials are slashing research funding and seeking to deport foreign students “accused of wrongthink”?

The spread of misogynistic and other toxic beliefs online has been put into the spotlight in Britain by the success of the Netflix drama “Adolescence“, about a 13-year-old boy who kills a girl; but the issue is constantly in the news. This week, a survey by the NASUWT teaching union found that almost three in five British teachers said they believe social media use has had a negative effect on pupil behaviour, with female staff bearing the brunt. One teacher reported boys “barking at female staff and blocking doorways… as a direct result” of watching videos by the influencer Andrew Tate.

Who is Andrew Tate?

The child of a British catering assistant and a US Air Force official, Andrew Tate grew up in poverty, and lived with his mother on a Luton estate. He became a pro kick-boxer, and achieved wider fame on “Celebrity Big Brother” in 2016; he was expelled when videos emerged of him hitting a woman with a belt (he said it was consensual). Proudly describing himself as a “misogynist”, who regards women as “property”, he was banned from X/Twitter in 2022 for declaring that women should “bear responsibility” for being raped. Now reinstated, he has 10.7 million followers: his bio reads “2025 Worlds [sic] Sexiest Man”.

He has made his wealth online, offering get-rich-quick advice at his Hustlers University, and self-help tips enshrined in his “41 Tenets for Men” (e.g. “each man has a sacred duty to mould his body into the strongest… version of itself possible”). He also has a webcam business. In 2022, he described his work as: “to meet a girl, go on a few dates, sleep with her, test if she’s quality, get her to fall in love with me to where she’d do anything I say and then get her on webcam”. In late 2022, Tate and his brother Tristan were detained at their home in Romania under charges of human trafficking and rape, which they deny. The investigation continues.

What exactly is the manosphere?

It’s a term coined in 2009, which refers to a network of blogs, online forums, podcasts and social media channels promoting traditional masculinity and anti-feminist beliefs. The manosphere’s roots are usually traced to the 1970s men’s rights movement, and the “pickup artist” scene of the early 2000s, devoted to the seduction of women; but it has grown on the internet into a variety of subcultures.

At the mainstream end are “bro-casters” such as Joe Rogan, America and the UK’s most popular podcaster, who caters to primarily male listeners, discussing subjects from martial arts and drugs to news and conspiracy theories; at a more intellectual frequency, there’s the conservative psychologist and guru Jordan Peterson. Influencers such as Tate, Adin Ross and Myron Gaines mix up self-help, fitness and business advice with dating strategies.

At the extremes are groups such as Men Going Their Own Way, whose users espouse male separation from the rest of society, and the “incels” – involuntarily celibate men who, says one critic, have constructed a “violent political ideology” around the refusal of “young, beautiful women to have sex with them”. All, though, are to some extent connected by the same underpinning ideology.

What kind of ideology is that?

Broadly, they share a sense that Western society is overly feminised, that men and boys are prevented from living out their authentic lives, and that they are often discriminated against. “Not all branches of the manosphere are overtly appalling,” noted The Washington Post a decade ago. “Not all of them are even run by men. That said, their core philosophy basically boils down to this: (1) feminism has overrun/corrupted modern culture, in violation of nature/biology/inherent gender differences, and (2) men can best seduce women (slash, save society in general) by embracing a super-dominant, uber-masculine gender role.” In the manosphere, there are recurring themes and beliefs, often articulated in distinctive jargon.

What sort of jargon?

As in far-right subcultures, people often say they have been “red-pilled”, a reference to the sci-fi film “The Matrix”, in which the protagonist swallows a red pill in order to see the disturbing truth: that the human race is kept in a simulation created by machines. The reality thus revealed is that of the “sexual marketplace”: the hierarchies and injustices caused by giving women freedom of choice.

Men are divided up into alpha males, average betas and, at the bottom of the heap, no-hoper omegas (though bucking this trend are the sigmas, admired lone wolves who exist outside the popularity jungle). The “80:20” theory, popular among incels, posits that 80% of women (known, if attractive, as Stacys) are only attracted to alphas (or Chads), who make up 20% of men. The remaining 80% of men, the argument goes, will find it very difficult to find mates, unless they go on to become well-off, when women discarded by alphas will marry them to leech off their wealth. This dynamic is popularly referred to with the phrase: “alpha f***s, beta bucks”.

There’s a great deal of dehumanising slang. Women are often described as “femoids” or “foids” (female humanoids). “Roasties” are women whom incels deem to have had too much sex. The acronym “Awalt” – all women are like that – posits that women are vapid, promiscuous gold-diggers. “Cucks” (cuckolds) are betas who have been deceived by them. When attempting to seduce women, pickup artists discuss “cavemanning”: using violence to overcome LMR (Last Minute Resistance) from women to force them into sex. One pickup artist boasted on a popular forum: “many times I have just thrown the girls over my shoulder”.

Do we have to take this seriously?

To some extent, these are just new variants of age-old sexism, but they come in a persuasive and ubiquitous format. Research by the charity Hope Not Hate in 2023 found that 79% of boys aged 16 to 17 in the UK had consumed content by Tate; only 58% had heard of the then-prime minister, Rishi Sunak. Like populist political leaders – Donald Trump is popular in the manosphere – figures such as Tate and Peterson appeal to men and boys who feel ignored and emasculated by post-industrial society. Tate offers harsh truths – “nobody cares how you feel” – and claims to tell his followers how to avoid being a “wage-slave brokie” in a dead-end job: how to “escape the matrix”. And in its most drastic forms, the manosphere can be very dangerous.

What dangers does it pose?

In May 2014, Elliot Rodger, a self-proclaimed “incel”, shot or stabbed six people to death, and injured 14 more, in Santa Barbara, California. He targeted the Alpha Phi sorority house, where he deemed the “hottest” female students at his college resided. In a manifesto, Rodger boasted he was “punishing women and all of humanity for their depravity”. Incels hail him as a “saint”. In April 2018 in Toronto, Alek Minassian killed 11 people and injured a further 15. Before the attack, he posted on social media: “All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!”