Arthur Shafer reviews David Healy's new book, Let them Eat Prozac for the Globe and Mail. Also check out Healy's website at www.healyprozac.com.

"Nowhere is it engraved in stone that a person’s life must last for only so long. The Bible’s dreary statement that a life span is 'three-score years and ten' and its tired talk about times to be born and times to die now smell strongly of plain old defeatism." Read Ian Frazier's "Everlasting" in this week's New Yorker.

"What if each of us could live a longer life, in peak physical and mental health, then suddenly shrivel away at the end, like Dracula when he is exposed to the sunlight? Would bioethicists still be so dour?" University College London geneticist David Gems asks these questions and more in his essay for The Hastings Center Report, "Is More Life Always Better?"

Wayne Johnson had always thought he was African-American, but when he took an ethnic DNA test, he learned otherwise. "The question is, are you who you say you are, or . . . who you are genetically?" Read "Black Like I Thought I Was", Erin Aubry Kaplan's piece on the implications of DNA testing for race and blackness.

"How is it that some technologies feel liberating, like a good pair of binoculars or a 1967 Volkswagen Microbus, while others feel so oppressive? What is it about a fully equipped modern kitchen that makes you want to stick your head in the oven? As Tenner understands better than most, we seem to understand a lot about the way technologies work, but very little about the way they work on us." Carl Elliott reviews Edward Tenner's Our Own Devices in The Boston Review.

"To describe Ross McElwee's documentary film "Bright Leaves" as a study of the tobacco industry in his native state of North Carolina would be a little like calling a Virginia Woolf novel a manual of etiquette. By the end of this reflective, wise, often hilarious movie, you feel as though he has slapped a huge chunk of raw, palpitating life onto the screen." Stephen Holden reviews Ross McElwee's new documentary, "Bright Leaves," in the New York Times.

"But, really, shouldn't we regard this trend -- to the extent it is a trend -- merely as the latest manifestation of children's evolving role as "aspirational" commodities, precious extensions of the parents' hope and ambitions? What more clearly telegraphs parental expectation of superior performance and status for their children than naming her after a well-calibrated Lexus (or "Lexxus," as one Cambridge, Ont., couple spells their daughter's name to make it "unique")? It's utterly consistent with the modus operandi of "hyper-achieving" parents, as exposed in this week's National Post series, who enroll their two-year-olds in French immersion and their older children in a gruelling schedule of extracurricular academic and athletic activities to give them a competitive edge." Anne Kingston writes about naming your kids after luxury items in The National Post.

"Tomorrow's People is the worst-written book I have ever reviewed. It is not enough to say that Greenfield has a tin ear. She has absolutely no idea how English sentences work, nor any feel for the vernacular." Bryan Appleyard reviews Susan Greenfield's Tomorrow's People: How 21st Century Technology is Changing the Way We Think and Feel, in The New Statesman.

"Who says I despair? That is to say, I would reverse Kierkegaard's aphorism that the worst despair is that despair which is unconscious of itself as despair, and instead say that the best despair and the beginning of hope is to be conscious of despair in the very air we breathe, and to look around for something better. I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That's despair?" A previously unpublished interview with Walker Percy in DoubleTake magazine.

"According to the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the pharmaceutical industry spends $8,000 to $13,000 per physician each year to promote its wares, which are hawked by a sales force of roughly 80,000 representatives... One popular sales technique involves trailing a doctor to a gas station, then offering to pay for a lube job -- during the wait at the shop, the sales representative has ample time to talk up his product." Brendan Koerner profiles Bob Goodman, a physician and founder of NoFreeLunch.org, in Mother Jones.

"In other words if you want to live to 150, you can't just tack on 60 extra years as an adult; you also have to extend infancy, childhood and adolescence. Children might not reach maturity until they were 30 or 40 years old. " Shannon Brownlee reviews Stephen Hall's Merchants of Immortality in The Washington Post.