Today the US turns 250, and the first American pope spent the morning on Lampedusa, the Italian island where migrant boats sink and the people who survive first set foot in Europe. Pope Leo prayed there for those who died trying to reach somewhere else, on the day the country famous for being the somewhere-else marks its birthday. Whether that pairing was deliberate or just how his calendar fell, it reads like commentary either way.

Back home, the actual holiday didn’t run to script either. “Trump Accounts” — the newborn investment accounts — opened for enrollment today, timed to the anniversary like a product launch riding a national mood rather than, say, a national mood riding a product launch. And PJM, the grid operator covering something like a third of the country, spent the Fourth in emergency mode, curtailing power as a heat dome pushed demand toward records and left close to a million people without electricity on the one day everyone’s outside anyway.

Smaller and funnier: Tesla capped employee spending on AI tools at $200 a week, with one exception — Grok. A company telling its staff to economize on artificial intelligence, then carving out room for the CEO’s own chatbot. That’s not really a budget policy. That’s a loyalty oath with a spending limit attached.

And in Tehran, four months after their supreme leader was killed at the start of the war, Iran finally held his funeral — crowds filling the Grand Mosalla, allies flying in from Beijing and Moscow. A four-month delay before an ordinary act of mourning is its own kind of statement about how strange this year has been.

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