But Wallace was also wary of ideas. He was perpetually on guard against the ways in which abstract thinking (especially thinking about your own thinking) can draw you away from something more genuine and real. To read his acutely self-conscious, dialectically fevered writing was often to witness the agony of cognition: how the twists and turns of thought can both hold out the promise of true understanding and become a danger to it. Wallace was especially concerned that certain theoretical paradigms — the cerebral aestheticism of modernism, the clever trickery of postmodernism — too casually dispense with what he once called “the very old traditional human verities that have to do with spirituality and emotion and community.” He called for a more forthright, engaged treatment of these basic truths. Yet he himself attended to them with his own fractured, often-esoteric methods. It was a defining tension: the very conceptual tools with which he pursued life’s most desperate questions threatened to keep him forever at a distance from the connections he struggled to make.

David Foster Wallace, philosopher.

Now that the writers' strike is over, it's perfectly appropriate to begin mining the headlines for script ideas. I call dibs on this one: Astronauts aboard the International Space Station apparently have access to a gun. I'll take this one too: NASA scientist suggests dinosaurs could have potentially made it to the moon. Thanks Neil for the first link, the "Biology in Science Fiction" blog I stole from Lisa's bookmarks for the second.