Hello and welcome to Gossip Time, a weekly guide to the stars by Allie Jones. This week: a pop star is happy, another pop star is sad, and Kylie Jenner is wearing a crop top (you know what that means).  Selena Gomez has been dating her perfect boyfriend Benny Blanco for nearly a year now, if you can believe it. So Us Weekly is right on time with this exclusive report: 

Sensitive fern was found in the 1700s, in Virginia. “Sensitive” because its fronds “suffer almost immediate damage from the first fall frost.” It doesn’t flower or produce seeds. No fern does, they sporulate. Sensitive is the only fern within the genus Onoclea. The Pteridophyte Phylogeny Group classifies it as such; my fern guide concurs. If I let my guide open to where the spine is cracked from use: Onoclea sensibilis, my favorite fern.

It’s been a surreal couple of weeks for me. For those who don’t know, after a year of ignoring some pretty scary symptoms, my doctor called to tell me that the results of some extensive testing revealed I have heart failure. I learned that typically means a person has a 50% chance of living five more years. I asked my doctor what I should do, and besides telling me I need to go to see the best cardiologist we can find, she said it was time to radically change my life.

As a proud pasta nerd, I take particular pleasure in learning about each shape’s name. Some refer to a legend or myth about how a pasta came to be; others evoke its physical form; still others are far more amusing than they are palatable. Vermicelli—“little worms”—are perhaps the most egregious of the bunch, with lumache (“snails”), linguine (“little tongues”), and strozzapreti (“priest stranglers”) following close behind. Today’s Pasta of the Month falls into this category, too: sfoglia lorda, or spoja lorda, which means “dirty pasta” or “dirty dough.

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