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[{"type":"text","text":"\"These are the days that we'll want back....\""}]

Smile 26 7 24

<title>Daily Smile: Friday, July 24, 2026</title>

"These are the days that we'll want back...."

Daily Smile: Friday, July 24, 2026

 &quot;These are the days that we&#039;ll want back....&quot;

Stephanie Salmons Headshot

Stephanie Salmons

Business & Tourism

Bayer, a global pharmaceutical and life science company, this week announced plans to make changes to its operations in Hawai‘i to "strengthen agricultural innovation" in the Islands.

In an announcement Wednesday, Bayer said the changes aim to "better align its land, facilities and resources with the future needs of the company's work in plant breeding, data-driven decision-making and agricultural technologies."

According to the July 22 announcement, these changes include consolidating some of Bayer's farm activities on O‘ahu and Maui over time, which will affect about 76 employees.

Bayer says it has filed a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, or WARN Act, notice, but that notice has not yet been 

In addition to several months advance notice and severance packages for eligible affected employees, Bayer says it also will offer support services throughout the transition, including career coaching, resume and interview preparation, job search assistance and financial well-being resources, the announcement noted.

"Bayer will continue operating on Maui, Molokai and O‘ahu, where its teams play a significant role in developing high-quality, sustainable seed products for farmers in the U.S. and internationally," it states.

“These changes are part of a broader transition that supports Bayer’s ongoing success in developing high-value seeds for agriculture, and our Hawai‘i operations will continue to play a critical role in that important work," Becky Ryan, Hawai‘i breeding pipeline and delivery lead, said in the announcement. “At the same time, we fully recognize that business changes do affect our employees, and we are heavily focused on supporting them throughout this transition."

When asked about consolidation plans, what farm activities will be affected and when these changes take effect, a Bayer spokesperson told Aloha State Daily in an email that the company did not have additional details to share at this time.

 on its website, Bayer said it had been operating in the Islands for more than 50 years with more than 8,000 acres of farmable cropland dedicated to the "development of new varieties of crops, both conventional and biotech."

The company said in that post that it uses modern agricultural technologies to grow conventional seeds as well as genetically engineered seeds.

For the latest news of Hawai‘i, sign up 

Bayer Soil health 072326

<title>Bayer to make changes to Hawai‘i operations</title>

These changes include consolidating some of the company's farm activities on O‘ahu and Maui over time, which will affect more than 70 employees.

Bayer to make changes to Hawai‘i operations

Kelli Shiroma Braiotta Headshot

Kelli Shiroma Braiotta

Food & Dining

, AC Hotel Honolulu’s bougie bodega, just launched a new grab-and-go menu called The Food Fix. It features a variety of fresh baked goods, garden salads, stacked and wrapped sandwiches, savory soups and more.

Common Ground offers coffee by Big Island Roasters, free wifi and pet-friendly patio seating. While you can still find traditional coffees — 

, lattes, cold brews and more — Common Ground also features new specialty drinks.

Choose from tiramisu latte ($8) — topped with Lāʻie vanilla foam and cocoa dust — mac nut latte ($8), ube latte and Lāʻie foam ($8) and matcha lilikoʻi yuzu fizz ($9).

The Food Fix was inspired by comfort foods and flavors, according to executive chef Chris Murakami.

“It should taste like a warm hug — like chicken noodle soup on a cold day,” he says. “We make everything in-house from scratch.”

Breakfasty options include the burrito ($15) — Portuguese sausage, egg and cheese, served with house salsa — the croissantwich ($15), which is filled with bacon, egg and cheese; and the parfait ($8), layered with Greek yogurt, honey, strawberries, blueberries and granola.

Customers can also enjoy overnight oats ($10) and chia seed pudding ($10); flavors for both dishes rotate weekly, according to Murakami.

“We like to have fun; the soup also changes weekly,” he says. “We have tomato bisque, chicken noodle and Kahuku corn chowder.”

For lunch, opt for the chicken Caesar wrap ($15), the grilled cheese ($12) — which features a combo of mozzarella, cheddar and provolone between pieces of sourdough — and salads like the cobb ($16) and the Waldorf ($16).

Bodega bundles feature combos like a grilled cheese and soup of the week ($20).

[{"type":"text","text":"Common Ground is open from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. Mondays to Fridays."}]

Common Ground chef 072226

<title>Common Ground launches The Food Fix in downtown Honolulu</title>

AC Hotel Honolulu’s elevated coffee shop just started a new grab-and-go menu with comforting eats like breakfast burritos, grilled cheese sandwiches, croissant sandwiches and more.

Common Ground launches The Food Fix in downtown Honolulu

Christian Shimabuku Headshot

Christian Shimabuku

Sports

[{"type":"text","text":"A brand new LPGA tournament is coming to the Big Island next spring. "}]

Kailua-Kona's Nanea Golf Club is set to host the inaugural Nanea Cup, which takes place from March 11-14 and features a $4 million purse. 

The Nanea Cup field will feature both LPGA and collegiate golfers in what the LPGA calls "

a first-of-its-kind competition celebrating both the present and future of women’s golf."

“Our excitement about adding the Nanea Cup to the 2027 LPGA Tour schedule is off the charts,” LPGA commissioner Craig Kessler said in a release. “As we continue to focus on routing, courses and purses, this event checks every box. Hawai‘i is a natural stop as we return from Asia and head to the West Coast. Nanea is a spectacular venue, our athletes will compete for a strong purse, and fans will get their first look at one of the most celebrated golf courses in the world. We’re grateful to Charles Schwab, Dell Technologies, Salesforce and Workday as well as the leadership and members of Nanea Golf Club, for helping make it happen.” 

 as the world's 59th greatest golf course, as well as the top course in the Islands. The private golf course, which opened in 2003, has never hosted a professional tournament, but that will change next March. 

Prior to the Nanea Cup, Nanea Golf Club has been home to the Nanea Invitational, a collegiate tournament hosted by Stanford, since 2013. 

The 2027 Nanea Cup will feature 95 golfers from the LPGA Tour, as well as 25 collegiate golfers from the likes of Texas, UCLA, Arkansas, Texas A&M and Stanford. 

The LPGA has already established a presence in Hawai‘i through the Lotte Championship, which has taken place in West O‘ahu annually since 2012, with the exception of 2020. 

South Korea's Youmin Hwang won the 2025 tournament

. The Lotte will return to Hoakalei Country Club in ‘Ewa Beach from Oct. 1-4 and features a $3 million purse. 

iStock golf general 072226

<title>New LPGA tournament set to debut on Big Island in 2027</title>

Nanea Golf Club will host the inaugural Nanea Cup on March 11-14, with features a $4 million purse.

New LPGA tournament set to debut on Big Island in 2027

Lopaka and Tanya Kapanui

Lopaka Kapanui and Tanya Kapanui

Hawai‘i History

Columnists

Prior to Western contact, the Waiākea Peninsula at the edge of Hilo Bay sustained a thriving Hawaiian community for generations. As Hilo gradually developed into an important port for the sandalwood trade, supply replenishment, and the whaling industry, the area began to change.

Although the traditional stewardship of the ʻaina ensured the loʻi kalo (taro fields) and the loko iʻa (fishponds) continued to provide food for the area, the peninsula slowly took on a different purpose. Then, the introduction of private ownership through the Great Mahele of 1848 forever changed how Waiākea would be managed.

With the expansion of Hilo Harbor, the wetlands were drained, and fishponds fell into disuse. To accommodate larger ships, the bay was dredged, and the fill from the bay was used to create new land along the shoreline. Ancient canoe landings disappeared beneath that newly created land, and much of the ceremonial landscape surrounding Kūakaʻananuʻu Heiau was erased. Roads, homes, and public buildings gradually spread across the shoreline, covering many of the features that had defined Waiākea for centuries.

Due to the harborʻs continued growth and change, today’s shoreline bears little resemblance to the one that greeted the first Western merchant vessels. During the early 1900s, a new public park was created to honor the last reigning monarch. Liliʻuokalani Gardens, with its walking paths, decorative bridges, and ornamental gardens replaced the loʻi kalo and loko iʻa, creating a space where residents and visitors could enjoy the shores of Hilo Bay.

In 1933, the Hilo Parks Commission invited director Cecil B. DeMille and other celebrities from the film "Four Frightened People" to plant banyan trees along a new roadway. Later that year, Babe Ruth planted a tree, and the road was formally designated the following year in time for a visit from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who planted his own tree. Over time, nearly 50 trees were planted by aviators, entertainers, politicians, and other notable visitors, and the Banyan Drive became known as “Hilo’s Walk of Fame.” In 1939, the Naniloa Hotel opened its doors on the site of a former yacht club, welcoming visitors to its tranquil location by the sea.

Like the rest of Hilo, the Waiākea Peninsula has had to face the destructive power of the sea. Tsunamis in 1946 and 1960 devastated the coast, destroying homes, businesses, and facilities along the waterfront. While many of the banyan trees survived, a new infrastructure once again reshaped the landscape and Banyan Drive soon became the center of Hilo’s visitor industry.

By the 1970s, Banyan Drive was already established as the center of Hilo’s visitor industry. The Naniloa and the new Hilo Hawaiian, along with other new hotels, welcomed travelers from around the world, while nearby golf courses, parks, and public spaces drew both residents and visitors to the bay.

Although centuries of development had transformed nearly every part of the peninsula, places like Mokuola (Coconut Island) continued to preserve a connection to an older Hawaiʻi. The landscape may look different from the days of loʻi kalo, loko iʻa, and Kūakaʻananuʻu Heiau, but its mana cannot be erased.

Perhaps that is why, despite decades of change, stories continue to emerge from Banyan Drive, describing experiences that seem to be connected to a long-lost past. Former staff have mentioned doors of empty rooms rattling for no reason, and housekeeping staff talk of the water faucets in one of the rooms turning on by itself.

However, the scariest stories are the ones about a group of visitors who turn up during specific moon phases, without reservations. One security guard said it starts with the sound of drums. It’s distant, but the sound is a consistent beat that doesn’t change like modern music. As the drums get louder, a mist appears on the building’s mauka side and moves through the wall and the hotel rooms, exiting through the wall on the opposite end of the building on their way to the ocean.

“I know it’s not my imagination,” he said. “The lights dim and flicker, pictures on the wall shake or fall to the floor, sometimes the furniture moves.”

The guard said that the employees at the hotel know to make themselves scarce during that time, but no one really talks about it with each other.

Grand Naniloa Hilo

<title>Night Marchers at the Naniloa</title>

Babe Ruth and President Franklin D. Roosevelt are among the Mainland luminaries who planted banyan trees along Banyan Drive. The history of the Hilo area surrounding the Naniloa Hotel goes back to ancient times, and as hotel staff tell it, on some nights the old days come marching through in a mist.

Night Marchers at the Naniloa

Higa headshot white shirt square

Sterling Higa

Government & Politics

 the president give a speech on one half of the screen while on the other half a panel of news anchors explained what he was saying and why it was wrong.

NBC and ABC would not broadcast the speech live on their networks. They streamed it instead. This is not the first time networks have declined to broadcast a presidential speech. Some did the same for Biden and Obama.

There was a time, within living memory, when a journalist waited for a speech to end before telling the country what to think of it. The waiting was a small courtesy, but it rested on a large assumption: that the people watching could be trusted with the raw facts and come to their own conclusions. The split screen quietly withdraws that assumption.

This paternalism is nothing new. Walter Lippmann explained it a century ago in his book 

. The world, he argued, is too vast and too tangled for ordinary people, who see it only through crude pictures in their heads. So a trained class must organize what the public perceives, and manufacture its consent.

Lippmann was only cribbing Plato. Plato’s guardians governed the city by a noble lie — a useful myth, administered for everyone’s good. The split screen is not a lapse from journalistic principle. It is the core journalistic principle, the one the trade was actually built on, surfacing for a brief moment.

And Lippmann was not wrong about everything. No one reads the actuarial tables behind an insurance bill. No one audits the Fed on a lunch break. Every one of us takes nearly everything on trust, from some mediator. The question was never whether we would be shaped. The question is who does the shaping, and by what light.

Be generous toward Lippmann: he was a philosopher, or at least he fashioned himself one. He had read widely in history and philosophy and could write a decent argument. And he shared his ideas with the public, in books and columns. A man could disagree with Lippmann and know exactly what he was disagreeing with. But when the critic Edward Said 

 Lippmann’s long career, Said saw America choosing in Lippmann “the style of reassuring authority over any concrete message or social vision.”

The modern pundit class is self-assured, but less reassuring. On social media, the thinking has grown thinner with each generation. A few news personalities have published books, though with ghostwriters at work it is hard to tell who has substance. The distance from 

 to 2026 is vast. But in asking mass media of any age to make sense of the world, we may be asking too much.

. A man may know every fact about the world and still not know what he must do about any of them. The gulf is not crossed by more facts, better sourced. For most of human history it was crossed by revelation, and the crossing was kept by the church. The clerics could tell a people what the events of the world meant, because they had a Word from outside the world to measure them by.

Said writes that Lippmann’s career was not 

— not the treason of the intellectuals. In reaching for that diagnosis, Said had the right crime and the wrong defendants.

Mass media could take the place it did because of treason by the clerics. The media did not storm the sensemaking chair. It found the chair empty and sat down, and it has held the office ever since without ordination. Christ had a brief comment on such arrangements: “if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit.”

How did the chair come to be empty? Somewhere along the way, the gospel got trimmed down to a private transaction — a boarding pass off a sinking ship, redemption with no bearing on Monday morning. Pulpits learned to tell a man how to be saved but not how to live, and congregations stopped asking.

An unreformed people will be formed by programming. The need for oughts does not lapse just because the supply does. So the evening news obliges. Each event arrives pre-narrated as the most important thing in the world. It is chosen from an endless mass by editors who do not say, and are rarely asked, why they chose it.

Which returns us to Lippmann. In 1937 he published 

, his blueprint for ordering the world justly.

That same year, Lippmann’s wife of 20 years 

, on grounds of “extreme cruelty, a violent, ungovernable temper.” This cleared the way for him to marry the woman he had been having an affair with, the wife of a close friend. Lippmann could draft a good society, but he could not manage a good household. That is not a scandal peculiar to Lippmann. It is the ordinary condition of blind guides, who are blind to their own blindness first.

The reformer’s instinct at this point is to imagine a better press — humbler, chastened, rigorous at last. But there is no press reform that survives contact with the humans who would staff it. The split screen is not an editorial policy that can be revised. It is pride, and pride is not fixed by better hiring. The media is fallen because humans are fallen, and the Lippmanns of the world will always volunteer to run the media — cheerfully, and with the best of intentions, which is rather the problem.

The remedy is not a better press but a smaller appetite for it. Think for yourself. The speech is 

And take your oughts from the One who is not clay. On the other half of the screen, the speech goes on — muted, waiting for someone to decide the country can be trusted to listen.

TV talking heads i Stock 1337097115

<title>NBC, ABC and the Trump speech: The century-old idea behind the networks’ decision</title>

The anchors couldn’t wait for the speech to end. ASD opinion columnist Sterling Higa on why the press acts like a priesthood — and why no reform will fix it.

NBC, ABC and the Trump speech: The century-old idea behind the networks’ decision

 — which was located at Pier 38 for about 14 years before closing in 2020 — is still open at Pearlridge Center (Wai Makai side, with the theaters).

The eatery is now under new ownership, and its menu has been updated. Regular customers don’t need to worry, though — many of the signature dishes are still there, but feature more of a gourmet twist.

the business last year, but has been gradually restructuring the kitchen and making updates to the menu. Yang 

previously led operations for Chef Mavro restaurant and Morimoto Waikīkī.

“I kept the names [of the dishes] the same, but [featured] new techniques,” he explains. “For example, the garlic ‘ahi is a classic here, but I use a traditional beurre blanc.

“The steak (bone-in rib-eye) is new; the Coho salmon is new,” he adds. “I try to rotate fish; one of my fish that I bring in from Japan — the snapper — I order directly from Tsukiji Fish Market. It’s really consistent and the quality is good.”

The menu still features a variety of appetizers, salads, sandwiches, and seafood entrees. The poke tower ($38) continues to be one of the eatery’s signature appetizers. It features a stack of short-grain rice layered with ‘ahi poke, guacamole, ‘ahi tartare, masago, nori and sesame seeds, and is served with housemade corn chips.

The cubes of ‘ahi poke are the highlight of the dish; they’re fresh, flavorful and clean-tasting. We especially enjoy the dish’s proportional rice-to-seafood ratio.

The fish tacos feature your choice of grilled or blackened ‘ahi topped with slaw, Sriracha aioli and crème fraiche in a flour tortilla. The tacos are served with housemade salsa.

The Sriracha aioli results in some lingering heat, but the ‘ahi is perfectly cooked.

The red snapper ($55) is one of the restaurant’s most popular daily specials. It’s blackened and drizzled with beurre blanc, and served with rice and seasonal vegetables.

The fish is flaky, moist and tender, and pairs perfectly with the light-yet-creamy beurre blanc.

If you prefer dining early, check out the eatery’s early bird special, which is available for dine-in form 4 to 6 p.m. (not available on holidays). The early bird special features two course menus — priced at $55 and $68 person — that include a starter (petite house or Caesar salad), choice of main entrée, and dessert. Entrée choices include garlic ‘ahi, fish tacos, garlic cream linguini, shrimp scampi, fresh local fish and chips and more.

“We added it (the early bird special) during the late summer,” Yang says. “(Previously) we did a bar menu, but I didn’t feel anything caught on. We started getting traction from the early bird menu.”

Be sure to check out the featured daily specials, which are listed on the “daily action” section of the menu. Popular options include salmon chazuke, offered on Thursdays, and Kona lobster melt, which is featured on Sundays.

The lobster melt ($38) is a showstopper, featuring about 5 ounces of buttery Maine lobster with tomatoes and melted cheese in a sandwich.

The specials listed under the “if you know, you know” section are available for preorder (customers must pre-order 48 hours in advance).

i garlic shrimp, gnocchi and steamed whole snapper are all popular — people ask for them,” Yang says.

The eatery also now has an expanded dessert selection, thanks to pastry chef Cherie Pascua, who previously was at d.k Steakhouse and Sansei. While regular menu features sundaes and gelato, daily specials range from haupia cake ($15) and blueberry cheesecake tarts ($15) to liliko

i orange white chocolate cups ($15) and coffee crème brulee ($12). Keep an eye out for any featured seasonal specials. 

The eatery also features live music from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. every Friday and Saturday.

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Daily Smile: Friday, July 24, 2026

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Daily Smile: Friday, July 24, 2026

Authors

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