Pick of the week’s Gossip

The German ballet director Marco Goecke has been suspended from his post for smearing a paper bag filled with dog faeces over a critic’s face. Goecke targeted the journalist Wiebke Hüster at the première of his latest show, having taken issue with a review she’d written of a previous production. In the piece, Hüster observed that his show was like being “alternately driven mad and killed by boredom”. Reportedly, the excrement had been freshly deposited by Goecke’s dachshund, Gustav. Hanover State Opera, his employer, declared that his “impulsive behaviour” had broken its code of conduct.

The singer Sam Smith caused a stir at last week’s Brit Awards by showing up in an inflatable latex suit. Its designer, Harri, told Vogue he’d had the idea for the suit when imagining what his dog must see when looking up at him. This was not the universal interpretation, however. One social media user joked that the outfit recalled the moment “when I fart in my wetsuit”. Another said it made Smith look like a burnt roast chicken.

When Salman Rushdie moved to New York after the fatwa, people were scared to be in his vicinity. To get them to relax, he told David Remnick in The New Yorker, he felt he had to show there was “nothing to be scared about”. One night, he was having dinner with a friend at a fancy restaurant when the artist Eric Fischl stopped by their table and asked, “Shouldn’t we all be afraid and leave the restaurant?” “Well, I’m having dinner,” Rushdie replied. “You can do what you like.”