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Smile 26 6 14

<title>Daily Smile: Sunday, June 14, 2026</title>

You can't go wrong with puppies and a baby...

Daily Smile: Sunday, June 14, 2026

 You can&#039;t go wrong with puppies and a baby...

Kelsey Kukaua Medeiros Headshot

Kelsey Kukaua Medeiros

Viewpoints

Aloha Spirit

The debate between the spelling and pronunciation of Molokaʻi or Molokai (with or without the glottal stop, or ʻokina, between the “a” and “i”) has been ongoing for decades.

Shortly after Aloha State Daily launched in January 2025, we decided to use diacritics in our reporting and across our website, setting out to do so accurately and consistently. 

The house style agreed upon at the time was "Molokai," based on this article from 

We chose to use the ʻokina and kahakō because, one, because our Content Management System allowed for it (some donʻt). But mostly, to preserve the culture, history and meaning of the Native Hawaiian language, people and places we write about daily.

Among our earliest articles was ASD Reporter Stephanie Salmons' 

, a professor of Hawaiian language and Hawaiian studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Hilo, who is also known as “the godfather of the Hawaiian language revitalization movement” in the 1980s.

According to past reporting, Kimura also was a producer for Ka Leo Hawai‘i, a 

 show that ran from 1972 to 1988, where he interviewed native ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi speakers. Those recordings can be heard at Kaniʻāina (

). Naturally, he was one of our go-tos on the Molokai question.

“Those speakers, who were born and raised on Molokaʻi, all pronounced the name of their island as Molokaʻi with the ʻokina letter,” Kimura recently told ASD by email. “Also, all the Native Hawaiian speakers not from Molokaʻi who interacted in conversation with them pronounced Molokaʻi with the ʻokina. … It is too bad the missionary alphabet did not know how to deal with that phonetic letter for the Hawaiian spelling back then.” 

For Hawaiian references, our newsroom primarily uses this site, 

, or a physical copy of the revised Hawaiian Dictionary co-authored by Mary Kawena Puku’i and Samuel H. Elbert in 1961, along with the revised and expanded edition of “Place Names of Hawai’i” by Puku’i, Elbert and Esther T. Mookini.

Those resources list the island as “Molokaʻi,” the latter book defining it as being “38 miles long, 10 miles wide, 261 square-miles in area, and in 1970, a population of 5,261.” Today, its population is between 7,000 to 7,500 people, per the most recent census data.

Merriam-Webster cites the geographical name as "Molokai," varying as “Molokaʻi." 

 has entries both ways but lists “Molokaʻi” first and most often, followed by “Molokai,” citing the revised Hawaiian dictionary by Henry H. Parker from 1922.

Peter T. Young of local planning and consulting firm 

opined that this debate dates back to 1778 when Captain Cook visited the Hawaiian Islands and attempted to turn an oral language into a written one, using 

Morotoi, or Morokoi (Molokai). See how the early writers spelled and pronounced certain words 

What seems to be the biggest point of contention; however, is over its meaning.

Molokaʻi (pronunciation: Moh-loh-kah-ee) translates to twisting or turning (“mola”) leader (alakaʻi).

Molokai (pronunciation: Moh-loh-kye or (Moh-Kye) means “twisting waters (kai)” or "gathering of ocean waters.”

Molokai native Miki'ala Pescaia shared with the Office of Hawaiian Affairs’ Ka Wai Ola magazine in June 2021: “When you put them together, what makes more sense 

 ‘Moloka'i’, the twisting leader, or ‘Molokai’, the twisting ocean waters? The late Harriet Ne 

 a historian, hula master and one of my father's teachers 

 said it should be 'Molokai,' referring to the waterspouts often seen off the island. Old maps show spelling variations, including Molokai, Morotoi and Molotoi, but they all have three syllables, not four as there would be when you say those words with an 'okina."

Current KWO Editor Puanani Akamine told ASD, “At OHA, we use the ʻokina mainly because that is how it is spelled in UH Hilo's online Hawaiian dictionary, 

. My grandmother was from Molokaʻi and a native speaker. She always pronounced it with an ʻokina, so that is my personal default, as well.”

asked Hālawa Valley resident Anakala Pilipo Solatorio to share why he uses “Molokai,” which he learned from his grandparents and ʻohana from the island. In the interview he notes, “My kūpunahine Lilia Hale also told me the same thing and went on to say that ʻMoloka'iʻ would refer to ʻAlaka'i,ʻ the Hawaiian value of leadership, which would then change the meaning ... to ‘twisted leader.’”

One Oʻahu-based Hawaiian language teacher didn't want to go on record with their thoughts for fear of backlash from the community. Some of the folks we asked from the Friendly Isle sided with “Molokai.”

 Executive Director Alice J. Ka'ahanui told ASD, “Personally, I choose to use ʻMolokaiʻ without the ʻokina because I was born and raised on Molokai and that is the way I was taught by our kūpuna. (It almost sounds like there is an 'okina because the ‘ai’ sounds like ‘eye’ with a heavy accent on ‘i’)."

She added that during the mid-to-late ’80s, that generation of college students started learning to use the ʻokina.

“I remember one person saying they learned the term ʻMolokaiʻ was incorrect because they likened the twisting and turning in the ocean to the way a toilet bowl turns. That cast a negative view of the word, and thinking back was probably used to encourage more people to pronounce it with the ʻokina.” Ka'ahanui continued. “To me, Moloka‘i just became a more contemporary pronunciation.”

“I also remember someone saying that when Mary Kawena Pukui was working on the dictionary, she didn't ask someone from Molokai for the pronunciation. It was someone on Hawaiʻi island that gave her the pronunciation.”

Kumu Pa’a Nui Lawrence Kalainia Kamani Aki of 

 is a 50th generation Hawaiian cultural practitioner, who teaches online and in-person workshops on the island.

“I live by the oral teaching of Na Kūpuna O Hālawa Valley, Molokai,” she told ASD by email. “I understand the University of Hawaiʻi standardizing the language. I have heard all the points of views of the younger generation and Na Kūpuna agreeing with the University of Hawaiʻi due to their degrees they have received from these Western education institutions.”

, also from Hālawa Valley, said that the pronunciation is not as important as the meaning, which he acknowledged references the ocean currents surrounding the island's southern shores.

pronunciations are correct and depends on which ʻohana you are speaking with.

Keldin Calairo-Nakagawa, lead singer of Hawaiian-reggae group 

told ASD this week that he uses both and that either way works.

ASD ghost stories columnist Lopaka Kapanui

 weighed in, saying, “According to natives of the island, and our dear friend whose ʻohana is from there, it's ‘Molokai,’ or 'rolling waters due to the Ka'iwi channel.'

 from the Mary Kawena Pukui Cultural Preservation Society, his answer broadened to, “Guess it depends.”

While “guess it depends” seems like the best answer for colloquial conversations, as a news organization where words are the backbone of our business and meaning matters not only to us but our readers, our inclination is to stick with Molokai.

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Molokai map

<title>Molokaʻi or Molokai, and why? ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi speakers, community share manaʻo</title>

Aloha State Daily revisits the Molokaʻi or Molokai debate over the spelling and pronunciation of the place name — with or without an ʻokina — initially for our own house style guide used across the website. Here’s what we learned from community members statewide.

Molokaʻi or Molokai, and why? ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi speakers, community share manaʻo

Higa headshot white shirt square

Sterling Higa

Government & Politics

Columnists

In the movie “Groundhog Day,” Bill Murray wakes every morning to the same radio jingle, the same snowdrifts, the same February 2. The film came to mind on June 9, when Maui County announced a Council briefing on the rewrite of its zoning code, coming up on June 17.

 headline calls the presentation an “update.” But two paragraphs down, Planning Director Jacky Takakura calls it “the beginning of an important, multiyear effort” to create a new zoning code. An update and a beginning are different things, and the difference here is six years of public money.

Title 19 is the body of law that decides what may be built on Maui and where. The current version was written for another era, with its last overhaul in 1960. It requires the pattern of a Mainland subdivision: one house, one large lot, repeat until the land runs out. It leaves little room for gentle density — the ʻohana units, duplexes, and townhomes that let working families live near where they work.

Every year that the old code stands, housing on Maui grows scarcer and pricier. Reformers have said this 

. The County agreed. In 2018, it published an 

 that showed the code was out of date. In 2019, it hired the audit’s author — Orion Planning + Design — to rewrite the code.

The project’s website promised “an anticipated six-year timeline” with seven phases, finishing in 2026. That year is here. The final code should be done by now, with a plan to put it in place soon after.

The County hired a consulting team it advertises as among the most experienced in the country. Orion Planning + Design leads it, joined by PBR Hawaiʻi, Rundell Ernstberger Associates, and the law firm Carlsmith Ball, whose listed duties include “presentations to officials.”

 page today — the page built to hold the finished work. Under Draft Documents: coming soon. Under Draft Ordinances: coming soon. Under Adopted Ordinances: coming soon.

The old schedule has fared worse. The site’s menu no longer links to it. The page survives for anyone who kept the 

In “50 First Dates,” Drew Barrymore wakes each morning with no memory of the day before. Adam Sandler keeps a videotape and replays it for her at breakfast. The archive is our videotape. Somebody has to remember.

There are reasons for delay, and good ones too. The pandemic arrived almost as soon as the work began, and then came the fire. Zoning changes move slowly everywhere, even without disaster striking. All of this is true.

But the rest of the county worked through both disasters. County employees even collected 

 for work during the pandemic. We can forgive a delay when it comes with an accounting. But this press release offers no accounting. It offers a rebranded beginning, as if the first six years were a dream from which we are all now waking.

The release promises that “no new zoning code content will be presented at this time.” Six years of consultant work, it seems, has produced no content.

We should read this charitably. Surely no one who works for Mayor Bissen, and no member of the County Council, has seen draft code chapters and decided the public shouldn’t. That would be unthinkable.

The charitable reading is merely that six years of consultant invoices and staff hours have produced nothing fit to show. Whichever it is, the paperwork exists.

None of this requires a scandal to fix. It requires basic stewardship — the kind expected of anyone managing someone else’s money. Publish whatever drafts exist, today, on the page built for it. Set a public deadline on a website that stays put, where anyone can check it. And put a name on the project: Planning Director Takakura, or whomever the Mayor chooses. Hold them to account for meeting deadlines.

The Council’s Housing and Land Use Committee should open the June 17 meeting by asking what was spent, what was produced, and where it is.

Bill Murray does not escape February 2 by waiting. The loop breaks the morning he becomes a different man. Maui County has been waking to the same morning for six years. The radio is playing the same song: an important effort is beginning, and the community will be a partner. June 17 is Maui’s chance to wake up to February 3.

Maui neighborhood

<title>Coming soon, for six years</title>

Maui County promised a new zoning code on a six-year timeline, notes ASD opinion columnist Sterling Higa. The six years are up, the website says “coming soon,” and the County is calling for a fresh start.

Coming soon, for six years

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Smile 26 6 10

<title>Daily Smile: Wednesday, June 10, 2026</title>

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Daily Smile: Wednesday, June 10, 2026

The most powerful man in the world got his start firing people on reality television.

For years Donald Trump leaned across a boardroom table and told contestants they were fired, and millions watched. When he ran for President, the bluntness that had been a television gimmick became a qualification for office. He spoke without a script and often without a filter. A great many Americans discovered they preferred a man who acted badly to men who performed well.

Politics runs downstream of culture, the saying goes, and culture runs downstream of whatever screen we happen to be staring at. The television screen that made Trump plausible has been retired. Now the glowing screens that replaced television are in the hands of the children who will pick his successor.

Each generation is raised by a medium, and they seldom notice. The grandparents had radio and the evening news. Their children had cable and a remote in hand. The next generation had broadband by high school. The youngest among us have clutched a glowing rectangle since before they could read.

David Foster Wallace once told a room of college graduates about two young fish. An older fish asks them how the water is. The two swim on for a while before one turns to the other and asks, “what’s water?” The hardest thing to see is the thing you are swimming in. And the water now is streaming.

A stream is a strange thing to describe to anyone who has never sat through one. A young woman plays a video game. A column of text races up the side of the screen, faster than a person can read, full of strangers shouting for her attention. The game is built to dole out small rewards on no fixed schedule, which is the same feature that keeps a gambler seated at a slot machine. Most of the time nothing happens. The viewer stays anyway. He’s probably playing his own game on another screen, and he is waiting, half there, for the day something interesting happens.

Children grow attached to these streamers. Many spend more hours each week with their favorite streamer than they do with their parents.

The streamer does not pose and does not edit. They sit for hours on end, and the rawness is part of the product. The generation before this one built careful profiles and took flattering photos, forever arranging the self for the selfie. This one lets the camera roll.

The printed word once demanded forethought. Ink is permanent, and a man preferred not to look a fool in something that would outlive him. A stream asks for nothing of the kind, only a camera, a connection, and a willingness to be watched doing very little.

If you do not recognize the names Ninja, Kai Cenat, iShowSpeed, or Pokimane, you are not swimming in the stream. But your 16-year-old nephew knows them well. His heart is being trained to speak as they speak and act as they act.

Someone will object that this is the worry of every graying generation. Plato fretted over the written word, our grandmothers over MTV, and the children always turn out fine. Perhaps, but a child reading a book after bedtime is one thing. That same child sitting beside a stranger late into the night, while their parents sleep, is another.

Who pays for all of this? As the saying goes, “whose bread I eat, his song I sing.” For most of history the bread came from a single hand: a patron, a publisher, a network. The streamer’s bread arrives from 10,000 hands, a few dollars at a time.

The man on camera learns, the way Pavlov’s dog learned, which tricks ring the bell. He drifts toward whatever is loud and lurid, because that is what loosens the audience’s pursestrings. And the streamer’s purse, more often than anyone cares to admit, is filled by the small donations of the lonely and unwell. The performer fancies that he is leading his audience. In reality, the audience is training the performer.

None of this stays in the world of entertainment. It is now, almost precisely, how a person raises money and wins office.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez raised more than $20 million last year. Most of that came in small sums from ordinary people. It’s the same $5 gesture that lands in a streamer’s account, pointed at a political campaign.

Television made Trump famous, and only later made him a candidate. With AOC it went the other way around. She was on camera before she was anyone, and the politics grew out of that.

 her journey to attend the Standing Rock protests. Then she got a call to run for office. Ten years later, she is an early front-runner for her party’s 2028 nomination.

AOC never stopped streaming. In 2020, she sat down to play a video game with Pokimane, then the most popular female streamer on Twitch. They drew a live audience of 400,000 people. This was two weeks before the election, and AOC was stumping to register voters.

 with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who was then running for Vice President as a Democrat. A few days earlier, Republican candidate Donald Trump sat for a 

 Joe Rogan interview. This was a week before the election.

The Psalmist said that men who trust in idols become like them. Our streaming idols never stop talking but rarely say anything. They speak through the night, whispering into our children’s ears. They perform for a few dollars at a time, taken from 10,000 hands. And soon, they may choose our President.

Kai Cenat livestream

<title>The politics downstream</title>

Presidents used to emerge out of whistlestop tours, radio address, television and cable. Now, for the youngest voters and voters-to-be, political power gathers in the frenetic world of livestreams. ASD opinion columnist Sterling Higa talks about what this means.

The politics downstream

Stephanie Salmons Headshot

Stephanie Salmons

Business & Tourism

Ala Moana Center is losing a longtime anchor tenant.

 it will close three more Neiman Marcus stores and 12 Saks Fifth Avenue locations across the U.S. — including the Neiman Marcus location in Ala Moana Center, which opened in 1998.

In January, Saks Global, which operates brands that include Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman and Saks OFF 5th, 

, the company said it is “refining the Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus store footprint to focus on profitable locations with the highest growth potential.” At that time, it was announced that eight Saks Fifth Avenue locations and one Neiman Marcus location would close.

In a statement provided to media on Friday, 

 said the organization — a statewide, membership-based, not-for-profit trade organization that advocates for and supports Hawai‘i’s retail industry

was “deeply saddened” by the pending closure.

“Since opening its doors in 1998, Neiman Marcus has played an important and meaningful role in Hawaiʻi’s retail community and in the lives of residents and visitors who have made the store part of their traditions and special,” the statement reads. “While we understand that this decision reflects broader strategic changes by Saks Global Enterprises, which has indicated a reduction in its physical store count and a focus on specific major markets and demographics within its luxury retail portfolio, the loss of the Honolulu store is significant for Hawai‘i. Neiman Marcus has long been a leader in luxury retailing here, helping to elevate Hawai‘i’s position as an international shopping destination.”

Lindsay Kahn, senior director of public relations for Ala Moana Center owner GGP, said in an email to Aloha State Daily that Friday's news "presents our team with an exciting opportunity.”

“This is extremely valuable real estate with coveted water views and opportunities to repurpose space of this scale are rare,” she says. “Ala Moana Center remains one of the most iconic retail destinations in North America, and we have proactively been working behind the scenes on future plans to further enhance this global center to our local community and visitors.”

, citing company officials, have reported that Neiman Marcus will remain open through the end of May. The exact closing date for Mariposa, a restaurant located within Neiman Marcus, had not yet been confirmed as of Friday, according to sources close to the retailer.

Ala Moana Center opened in 1959 and is the world's largest open-air shopping center with more than 2.4 million square feet of retail space. It offers more than 350 stores and restaurants and 160 dining options.

 In addition to Neiman Marcus, other anchor stores include Bloomingdales, Nordstrom, Macy’s and Target.

 in 1907, founded by Herbert Marcus, his sister Carrie Marcus Neiman and her husband, A.L. Neiman. They were torn between starting their own company that would bring "world-acclaimed fashion design home to Texas," or investing in an emerging beverage company — Coca-Cola. 

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I Stock neiman marcus ala moana 030926

<title>Neiman Marcus to close at Ala Moana Center</title>

Last month, parent company Saks Global Enterprises said it is “refining the Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus store footprint to focus on profitable locations with the highest growth potential.”

Daily Smile: Sunday, June 14, 2026

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Daily Smile: Sunday, June 14, 2026

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