In March 1973, members of the terrorist group Black September held a Belgian and two American diplomats hostage in Khartoum, Sudan, and demanded the release of various prisoners, including Sirhan Sirhan, the man convicted in Sen. Robert Kennedy’s murder. A reporter asked President Nixon how he planned to respond. With the nation’s memories of the late senator still fresh, Nixon couldn’t appear to entertain concessions that would free the assassin.

In the spring of 1886, thieves stole a young Theodore Roosevelt’s boat from the banks of his ranch in Dakota Territory. Roosevelt and two ranch hands pursued the men down the Little Missouri River and arrested them after three days, avoiding a shootout. The group nearly froze while waiting eight more days for an ice jam in the river to clear. Hungry and exhausted, Roosevelt then escorted the men to the nearest jail, a 36-hour walk away. He described meeting a settler who “could hardly understand why I took so much bother with thieves instead of hanging them offhand."

In early 2016, Liane Bednarz noticed a surge in far-right rhetoric on her Facebook news feed. One trend was particularly unsettling: Many of the authors were people she’d met in Christian circles over the years. Bednarz had been watching certain German Christians drift beyond conservatism and into far-right populism since 2013, but she was struck by how explicit their rhetoric against Muslim immigrants had become. She began to investigate the phenomenon in earnest, and in April 2018 published a book called Preachers of Fear: How Christians of the far right are undermining society and the churches.

Isobella Duffy runs a bed and breakfast west of the River Foyle on the north side of Derry—or Londonderry, depending on your persuasion. She tolerates the misfortune of living barely a mile inside the confines of Northern Ireland, technically Britain, by ranting to captive audiences at breakfast. The house should’a been in the Free State. A still-smoking plate of egg, sausage, and tomato meets the table with a clatter that could pass for accidental. Would’a been, except for those damn city walls.

Through Shanghai’s metro station security checkpoints and carefully controlled foot traffic lanes, state control is ever-present. The Communist Party promotes its 12 “core socialist values” in this gleaming underground expanse, alongside mascara and KFC advertisements: reminders to be civil, just, and friendly. Commuters, under smartphones’ spells, disperse impassively into mega-malls and food courts that blend into the stations. The effect seems lost on them.

From the relative safety of Bangladesh’s cramped coast, Rashid could finally believe that freedom was within reach. He thought often of the violence that had driven his family from Myanmar’s Rakhine State: the friends jailed and tortured by Buddhist nationalists; the women violated; the heavy-handed restrictions enforced against fellow Rohingya Muslims. But it was his memories of scenes from Indian TV shows that gave him hope — and an idea.

Ms. Bowler’s and Ms. Ehrenreich’s observations about our culture-wide denial of bodily decay lead them down distinct paths of interrogation and discovery. For all their research, they are not prepared to give us easy answers. Still, their dry humor and raw, personal accounts help make thinking about our common fate bearable. We may have a few extra years yet to sip kale smoothies, run marathons and get tested for everything under the sun, but we ought not make physical health our ultimate hope.

Evan Mawarire was midway through his sermon on Africa Sunday 2015, an annual church event dedicated to celebrating the church, when more than 70 congregants began to shift in their chairs. “The African leader has found it important to shut down any voice that challenges him,” Mawawire told them. “And yet the African leader does not realize that the voice speaking is a voice of development; it is a voice of progress.”

On a characteristically hectic workday in 2004, Duncan Jepson was at his desk in the Hong Kong office of ING Group, a multinational banking and financial services company. He had just seen a reminder to check for possible variations of Osama bin Laden’s name, using ING’s anti-money-laundering compliance software. The US government and its allies were determined to deny the world’s most wanted man access to funds and had passed legislation in 2001 to ensure banks conducted due diligence in screening their clients.

A pediatric inpatient ward in the Sylvanus Olimpio University Teaching Hospital of Lome, the capital of Togo, sat vacant for much of February. The water had stopped running, and staff were short several supplies: a pair of scissors, a rolling cart, a blood pressure cuff to fit children’s arms.

Clean-shaven and dressed in a Western-style suit, the stranger seated on Rasoul’s carpet asked to marry his host’s daughter, the wife he’d chosen for himself. Rasoul had never seen the caller before—a rarity in his tight-knit neighborhood near the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad—so he stalled for time to ask around.

Corruption allegations and political unrest in Africa have too often prompted halfhearted concessions or constitutional tweaking by strongmen bent on staying in power. But the past week’s two notable counterpoints are only the latest in a string of surprising developments around the continent.

A drawn-out coup in Zimbabwe has now culminated in the resignation of Robert Mugabe and the elevation of his former vice president Emmerson Mnangagwa, who has already been named ruling party chief and the party’s 2018 presidential nominee. Mnangagwa’s rise to the nation’s highest office is not surprising, for all of its bizarre behind-the-scenes orchestration. But it isn’t particularly promising for those who care about democratic progress, either.

A visitor to Zimbabwe’s capital city could be forgiven for missing the apparent military coup underway at Harare’s “Blue House.” But despite business-as-usual in much of the city, anxiety and confusion are rife beneath the surface.