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Conditions on the train

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David Greene: From Russia To NPR With Love

It depended. We went a lot in third class because I really just wanted to sort of feel what it was like to ride the rails. And a lot of Russians who are going to see family or traveling from one place to another, they go in third class. And I would describe it, sort of, as a college dormitory. Actually, I think back, even more primitive than my college dormitory.

Each little area of an open train car would have six bunks, so you'd be kind of right up against the window. And there were four bunks — two and two — and the bunks were on top of each other. Then there was this aisle where people would constantly walk back and forth and not care if they ran into your bed or anything. ...

And navigating these bunks was horrifying. I mean, you had to really be a gymnast — which I am not — to kind of climb up and get up onto the bunk. And it's really humiliating because everyone's watching.

On the enforced intimacy on the train

[You] go back to Soviet times and, in communal apartments, people in Russia, they learned to live on top of each other. It was both great because families got to know each other and it was awful because there were times when families would basically spy on each other for the government. So it was both extremes. But they learned to be on top of each other, to share space.

And you would sort of have to, as an outsider ... get used to that. I mean, there were these customs. You know, if you had a lower bunk bed, if someone wanted to come in and get up to his or her upper bunk, the assumption was, you shouldn't care if I need to basically step on your face while you're sleeping to get up. That's the way this is! We're sharing this space! So you have to get used to that rhythm of life.

On the train food

Basically, vodka is the best thing to do in the dining car because that — you know they will always have it. They have this giant menu with all these delicious choices, and usually none of them are actually available. So you sit there asking, "Oh, can I have the chicken julienne or the mushroom julienne?" "Nyet, nyet, nyet, nyet." "So what do you have?" "Borscht." "Ok, let me have some borscht." Which was fine, but — people would bring their own food on the train and share it.

The first time I was on the Trans-Siberian, I was humiliated because I didn't realize that was such an important tradition. And I walked into a neighbor's train car and she waved me in and had a piece of Belarusian sausage from her family and this delicious horseradish concoction. She's offering all of this to me, and all I had was a Luna bar that I brought from home.

On the Trans-Siberian versus Amtrak

Amtrak is boring now. There's really never a dull moment [on the Trans-Siberian]. There might be a Russian guy who has gotten way too hot in his compartment and has come out into the aisle. And he's in, essentially, his underwear — you know, boxer shorts and a tank top. And hiding a cigarette that he's sort of taking puffs of when no one's looking — because you're not supposed to smoke on the train — and gazing out into this empty landscape. But I don't get that on Amtrak. It's just these moments, and the food sharing and the conversation. There's just so much life.

Track star Oscar Pistorius has been sentenced to five years in prison for the fatal shooting of his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp.

Pistorius, an Olympic and Paralympic athlete, was given a verdict of culpable homicide by a judge in South Africa in September — a conviction that could have put him in prison for 15 years. As we reported at the time, Pistorius was found not guilty of the more serious charge of premeditated murder.

The Two-Way reported:

"[Judge Thokozile Masipa] said there wasn't sufficient evidence to support the notion that Pistorius, 27, knew that Reeva Steenkamp was behind a locked toilet door in his home when he fired several shots on the morning of Valentine's Day 2013."

Oscar Pistorius

A grand jury has yet to decide if it will indict Darren Wilson, the police officer who fatally shot 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., this summer.

Protests over Brown's death are ongoing in Ferguson, though they are calmer than the sometimes violent clashes that happened immediately after the shooting.

Still, many residents there are worried about public reaction once the grand jury announces its decision, and some say they've had enough. They're planning to move. That could accelerate an already existing trend in the region.

If you're taking the highway, Ferguson sits about 20 minutes northwest of downtown St. Louis, putting it in the inner ring of the northern suburbs.

A couple of generations ago, this was where the wealthier residents moved in search of better schools and bigger houses. Most lots here have single family houses built just after World War II, with tall trees and sidewalks.

Pearce Neikirk grew up here, and has watched the suburb of 20,000 shift from mostly white residents to about two-thirds black residents. He says houses here in Ferguson are more affordable than houses in suburbs further away from the city. But more affluent residents continue to move west.

"As their incomes increased, decided, well hey, I can buy something new, I can buy something bigger, I can buy something with land around it," Neikirk says. "And so then they do of course leave."

Neikirk, who's a realtor here, says in the initial weeks of the protests, his phone didn't ring at all. Neikirk allowed some of his clients to withdraw their homes from the market. Some buyers were concerned that the properties they were looking at would lose value. Realtors have sold fewer than half as many homes over the past 30 days compared to the same time last year, but it's a slow time of year for real estate anyway.

"It's just one of these things where no matter how we sort the MLS data or no matter how we look at the tax rolls, there's not a picture being painted yet," he says. "Now, I think that is going to be painted in the next 4 or 5 months."

But resident Afrika Bryant isn't waiting that long: "Yeah, I want to get out of here. You know?"

Bryant lives a block away from the burned-out Quik Trip gas station, which became the epicenter of many of the first protests in Ferguson. She's a nurse and mother of four, who's recently remarried. A few days after the Michael Brown shooting, about a dozen of her friends and family members gathered in her backyard to celebrate her wedding. But when police cracked down on protesters in the street nearby, tear gas hurled towards her sun porch.

"I can literally show you three cans of tear gas. They were shooting rubber bullets," Bryant says. "My neighbor, she's like 70 years old, she's in her backyard looking at what's going on, they shot her."

Bryant is now making plans to move when her lease is up in the spring.

But will there be a mass migration from Ferguson? A lot of Bryant's neighbors have lived here for decades, and say they won't leave under any circumstances.

University of Iowa history professor Colin Gordon studies urban sprawl in the St. Louis region, and he expects the protests to accelerate the pattern of suburbanization that was already well underway.

"What shaped the state of the city a generation ago — people reacting to the size of houses, the declining quality of schools — that's now happening to the inner suburbs like Ferguson," he says.

Gordon says discriminatory housing practices and zoning laws in and around St. Louis kept most black residents from moving out of the city until the '70s and '80s. When wealthier black families began to move into suburbs such as Ferguson, some white families moved further west. Now, Gordon says it's more economic migration than it is white flight. When the wealthier families move out, house prices drop, and communities become affordable. But with those lower property values come other issues.

"It's a sort of vicious cycle because schools rely on local funding. If the schools deteriorate because the local funding is falling off, what's the response, people leave," Gordon says.

But homeowner Brian Owens isn't leaving. As we walk through a neighborhood near an elementary school, where he might send his kids someday, Owens says there's an opportunity here for Ferguson, to possibly come together and address the problems that have plagued so many other cities.

"We have a responsibility to stay. A lot of those changes are hard changes, and are going to take a lot of work and a long time," Owens says. "But, that's OK. Because nothing worth having ever comes easy, or ever comes quickly."

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On Monday, Apple is rolling out a new way to pay: a digital wallet called Apple Pay. Millions of people with the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus will be able to tap — rather than swipe — at the register.

The move could be a major change in how we shop. Or it could end up as a blip on the map that fades away, as other "mobile wallets" have in the past.

Here are some questions you might be asking:

I have a leather wallet in my back pocket. Am I going to have it a year from now, given this mobile-wallet revolution?

If Apple is successful, you won't have credit cards in your leather wallet. It'll just be an accessory, kind of like a watch.

Apple preloaded the payment app onto the new iPhone 6 and 6 Pluses. The company made a big and highly public push to partner with retailers. Dozens of chains, including McDonald's and Walgreens, are accepting Apple Pay. But others, like Target and Starbucks, don't have the tapping technology at their registers yet. (It's called a near field communication chip.) Those companies will be able to accept the payment method through their apps.

That said, it's going to be hard to convert the masses — in part because it's already very easy to pay with a credit card. Apple knows conversion is not a given, and it's making this an all-out campaign. Years and years of others' (failed) attempts have shown it will take a push to make a mobile wallet the new normal.

When CEO Tim Cook announced Apple Pay, he emphasized the customer experience. But it's not just about the ease of tapping, right? This is a security measure.

That's right.

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Apple Pay uses Touch ID, a biometric identification, to verify that you are the iPhone owner and not some thief tapping to pay. Then there's a chip inside the phone, which they call the "secure element," that generates a digital token. This token is for one-time use, and it's a technology that leading engineers and companies have been working to design for years. So if hackers get it, it's not the same as if they get credit card numbers.

There seems to be a lot of hype around this mobile wallet. But it's not the first one. For example, doesn't Google have one, too?

Apple and Google's mobile wallets had very different rollouts — and that's telling in terms of the differences between the companies and where the appetite for this technology stands.

Google canvasses the world with experiments. Its mobile wallet, released in 2011, is one such experiment. The launch was fairly limited: To use the Google Wallet, you had to sign up for a MasterCard account from Citibank or get a Google Prepaid Card.

With Apple Pay, the launch looks like an all-out united front. Now Visa, MasterCard and American Express are on board; and in addition to Citibank, there's Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America. Apple says its alliance represents 83 percent of credit card purchase volume in the U.S.

Apple's marketing push — putting pressure on retailers and banks to come along — could tip the scales. That said, if it does, Google and others can ride the wave.

credit cards

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