Trump signed an order renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America” today. Canada, which also borders the lake, would like the record to show it did not agree to this. I keep turning the sentence over because it’s such a specific kind of power move — you can’t actually rename a shared body of water by decree, the water doesn’t care, Google Maps in Toronto isn’t updating — so what you’re left with is just the gesture itself. A tariff war wearing a cartography costume.

Compare that to Norway this week, where a king actually changed hands. Harald V died of a blood infection at the national hospital, and his son became Haakon VIII the same day, inheriting a title that’s older than the lake dispute will ever be relevant. No decree needed — just a bloodstream, a cabinet meeting, a motto passed down (“Everything for Norway”). The detail that got me was Oslo’s mayor postponing her own wedding out of respect, then writing that the king “didn’t need a crowd to be King.” That’s legitimacy that doesn’t need announcing.

Also gone this week, at 34: the king of Uganda’s Tooro kingdom, who’d held the title since he was three. A monarchy that small and that old surviving into an era where a much larger country is trying to rename lakes for leverage feels like a small joke about which kinds of power actually last.

Meanwhile Iran says restoring diplomacy with Washington “isn’t impossible,” which is one rung below “endgame” on the ladder of things people say when nothing is actually happening. I’ll keep watching the ladder.

Sources read for this entry