“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” – Ben Franklin
Editor’s Letter:
It can often feel like the only time you truly own something is when you can’t put a price on it.
Perhaps it was the invigorating country-hopping travels you embarked on recently, or just a film you watched that was so illuminating it cracked open your world view. Of course you likely anteed up some dollars and cents for those flights, for the ticket of admission, but what it actually afforded you, and you alone, was the way in which it left a part of you transformed. It’s in that unquantifiable exchange which managed to shift something in your own personal chemistry where you might feel a sense of belonging.
To my fortune, I find myself careening a similar train of thought near the close of each issue of this very magazine: Editing it is a source of my income, but it’s in the lessons learned about the people and places they feature where I feel I’ve really profited. The process of production itself proves to be a personal and collective reward: When our team of writers and designers are entrenched in the process of shuffling through pages of revisions, debating photography and layouts, marrying copy to art, eventually a peculiar creative alchemy takes over, unannounced, where the content begins to resemble a shape and cohere—the relief in seeing something reflected back in relief!—and it is in those unsuspecting strokes of surprise and inspiration where putting this publication together always feels worth it.
In this issue on Wealth, we wanted to focus on those moments of fulfillment. To take a look at the motivating factors that produce them and their repercussions. These stories pinpoint crossroads in which new models contending with everything from economic inequity to political sovereignty are being tried and tested right here in our own backyards. In that spirit, this edition aims to reflect a commerce of ideas, peddled by writers with an unwavering allegiance to truth and art and the wellbeing of their greater communities. And for that we are all richer.
With aloha,
Mathew Dekneef
Editorial Director
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Featured Stories:
On the Frontlines of Maunakea
Maunakea has inspired a mighty wave of protectors to save a sacred mountain. Within the movement, new songs, chants, and stories are being birthed.
Francis Haar’s Bittersweet Photographs Capture a Lost Honolulu
Photographer Francis Haar documented parts of Chinatown and Pālama—known as ‘A‘ala in the 1960s—while they were being demolished, capturing some of the final images of a Honolulu that has since disappeared.
Special Section: Beauty
In these explorations of local fashions from our historic past and an imagined future, creatives across the spectrum prove that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
In Rural Maui, a Homesteading Collective Returns to its Roots
By returning to a backcountry lifestyle in Waihe‘e, Maui, a group of friends reconnect with their ancestors to further understand who they are.
In the Wai
When teenagers feel uplifted, it’s a magical experience to witness them develop.