The federal government mistakenly made public a 266-page report, its pages marked “highly confidential,” that gives detailed information about hundreds of the nation’s civilian nuclear sites and programs, including maps showing the precise locations of stockpiles of fuel for nuclear weapons. The publication of the document was revealed Monday in an online newsletter devoted to issues of federal secrecy. That set off a debate among nuclear experts about what dangers, if any, the disclosures posed. It also prompted a flurry of investigations in Washington into why the document had been made public. — “U.S. Accidentally Releases List of Nuclear Sites,” William J. Broad, The New York Times

Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Co., the third-largest U.S. life insurer by 2008 sales, has bought gold for the first time the company’s 152-year history to hedge against further asset declines. “Gold just seems to make sense; it’s a store of value,” Chief Executive Officer Edward Zore said in an interview following his comments at a conference hosted by Standard & Poor’s in Brooklyn. “In the Depression, gold did very, very well.– “Northwestern Mutual Makes First Gold Buy in 152 Years,” Andrew Frye, Bloomberg

The death of the author– a fatality acted out in critical theory more than in poetry– supposedly was yet another moment of such cleavages in the history of reading, writing & attention. Conceptual poetry both notices these recurring break points, not to mention the uglier reality that the earlier modes never actually go away– intellectually, the anti-modernists are still afraid to look down as they venture across that gap in the mountains– and tries to both replicate that moment yet again & step outside the paradigm at the same time. But it’s not possible to do both simultaneously: “glorious failure,” Conceptualism’s antidote for the “adorable detail,” is in fact just another mode of detailing & glorious as a category is all about mastery. — “Wednesday, June 03, 2009,” Ron Silliman, Silliman’s Blog