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Peter Fredell carries an unusual wallet. It feels a bit like leather, but the material is pale and thin. He pulls it out on a street corner in Stockholm, Sweden.

"I actually made it myself," he says. "It's an eel that I fished up. And I used the skin and stitched it together."

This eelskin wallet carries personal significance — but it does not carry cash.

Around the world, cash is fading. Electronic transactions are becoming a bigger part of the economy every year. And one of the leaders in this trend is Sweden, where more than 95 percent of transactions are digital.

Fredell is the CEO of a company called Seamless that designs payment systems for cell phones.

Back in his office, I asked him to recall the last time he needed cash.

He thought for a bit.

"My son plays ice hockey, and I had to give something to the ice hockey team, and so I gave them some cash," Fredell says eventually. "But as a matter of fact, that will disappear too."

He says the ice hockey team has just started taking cell phone payments.

I decided to see just how far this goes.

So, we stuck our heads out of Fredell's office to the open-plan workspace. I ask if anyone has cash on them. Person after person shakes their head no.

Finally we found one employee with cash — an engineer named Wilhelm Svenselius.

He says he needed it for a party the previous weekend. It was held at a bar that doesn't take cards, and Svenselius had to get cash especially for the occasion. He says that happens once a month or so.

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In this photo from 2011, Vicar Johan Tyrberg of the Carl Gustaf Church in Karlshamn, southern Sweden, stands next to a credit card machine enabling worshippers to donate money to the church collection electronically. Camilla Lindskog/AP hide caption

itoggle caption Camilla Lindskog/AP

In this photo from 2011, Vicar Johan Tyrberg of the Carl Gustaf Church in Karlshamn, southern Sweden, stands next to a credit card machine enabling worshippers to donate money to the church collection electronically.

Camilla Lindskog/AP

Of course, these people work for a digital payment company.

But national data show that in Sweden, they are not unusual. There are churches that pass a digital payment system with the collection plate. Some homeless people who sell newspapers on the street take digital payments.

Ruth Goodwin-Groen runs the Better than Cash Alliance, which the U.N. and major global foundations are funding as part of an effort to move the global economy away from cash toward digital transactions.

"This is a means of helping achieve many different goals," Goodwin-Groen says.

Electronic transactions are more transparent and more accountable, she says. They cost less, and they're more secure. It's a global trend, from the developing world to the biggest, most advanced economies.

But there are holdouts.

Ron Shevlin is a senior analyst at the Aite Group, a financial services firm in Boston.

"For some consumers, and especially older consumers, they prefer cash and don't prefer to use cards or mobile payments," he says.

And people making illegal purchases on the black market will always prefer cash.

Plus, he says, digital transactions do raise security concerns.

"In some respects, the economic impact is negative because of the propensity for data breaches and fraudulent transaction," Shevlin says.

Back in Stockholm, Fredell is already imagining ways to make cashless transactions completely secure.

"My favorite payment actually is DNA payment. You spit in a cup next to the cashier," he says.

That spit-system doesn't exist anywhere yet.

"But it's the absolutely safest way, right?" Fredell says. "Someone would have to copy your DNA."

It's a dream — but not one that he sees happening any time soon.

sweden

In a move aimed at breathing life into Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement, thousands gathered at the city's Victoria Park today in open defiance of Beijing's insistence that it have final say on candidates for the territory's next leader.

Organizers said 13,000 attended the rally, but police claimed the figure was 8,800. Regardless, the number is far fewer than the tens of thousands that came out for past protests calling for free and open elections in 2017 to choose a new "chief executive" for the former British colony.

In any case, The South China Morning Post says it's "the first major post-Occupy Movement mass rally."

According to the SCMP:

"[Placards] and balloons all paying homage to the "Umbrella Movement" abounded. At 2.20pm, the march began with the head of the rally leaving Victoria Park's eastern entrance through Tin Hau.

"Leading the charge were key figures of the Occupy Central movement including Benny Tai Yiu-ting, Chan Kin-man and Reverend Chu Yiu-ming. Others at the front included Democratic Party founding chairman Martin Lee Chu-Ming as well as Daisy Chan Sin-Ying."

Reuters reports that some 2,000 police flanked the protesters as they marched through the city's glitzy shopping and financial districts, "seeking to avoid a repeat of the so-called Occupy Central campaign that saw demonstrations shut down key roads for 2-1/2 months."

Beginning in August, the mass protests attracted international attention amid fears of a Tiananmen Square-style crackdown that never came. However, Hong Kong police did move aggressively on several occasions to try to break up the mass protests that paralyzed parts of the city.

In September, at the height of the mass protests, we published this primer on the history of Hong Kong and what's at stake for the pro-democracy movement.

Hong Kong protests

China

As our plane touches down in Sundsvall, Sweden, the horizon is all snow and ice. A small air traffic control tower sticks out above the white horizon.

But this airport actually has two air traffic control centers. The second one is just a short walk from the airport runway.

Inside a ground-floor, windowless room, there's a display that looks exactly like what you'd see out of an air traffic control tower. You can see the snowy runway, you can see the trees, you can even see a car pulling into the airport parking lot.

But instead of windows, these are actually screens. And the airport you're looking at isn't the one in Sundsvall. It's the one in Ornskoldsvik, Sweden — about 105 miles away.

Ornskoldsvik is the first airport in the world to land passenger planes remotely. This summer, an airport in Leesburg, Va., will become the first American airport to use the new technology.

Erik Backman runs the remote airplane landing center in the town of Sundsvall. He explains that the town of Ornskoldsvik has a tiny airport, and it's expensive to keep air traffic controllers there who spend hours with no planes to land.

So they decided to have one team in Sundsvall that could handle both cities.

"The day you have one air traffic controller who can control two airports, then you have some good benefits according to costs," Backman says.

A 'Paradigm Shift' For The Industry

In Ornskoldsvik, a set of cameras and microphones delivers a real-time image to Sundsvall. Of course, new technology is notoriously glitchy.

And a problem landing an airplane is far more consequential than a laptop freezing up.

Backman says when he saw the first mockup of this technology in 2004, he was dubious. The room had to be dark, the pictures were jumpy.

But a decade later, they've been landing planes remotely for months without any major problems.

Mikael Henriksson, the project manager, has been an air traffic controller for 40 years. He says in all his time looking out tower windows, there were only three big innovations: blinds to block out the sun, thicker glass to block out the noise, and bug zappers to get rid of the flies.

Now, he's had a chance to play with this new technology, and he can't believe it only arrived near the end of his career.

"For the air traffic controller, this is like airline pilots going from propeller to jet," Henriksson says. "It's a paradigm shift."

Many Uses, Including Potentially For The Military

Because once the windows are replaced with screens, you can overlay all kinds of information on the display: airplane numbers, runway incursion warnings. You can zoom in, or switch to an infrared view to see through thick fog or darkness.

And that might make this technology useful even for big, crowded airports.

Anders Carp is head of traffic management at Saab, the Swedish defense and security company that created this technology. He thinks there are worldwide — even military — applications.

Airports in dangerous places could have a camera house instead of a control tower, he says. The air traffic controllers could be a few — or a few thousand — miles away in a safe environment, because it doesn't matter whether the remote tower is across town or on the other side of the earth.

Back in the Sundsvall control center, a plane descends toward the Ornskoldsvik runway. We watch it move across the screen. The sound shifts in stereo as the plane rolls along.

The passengers — and even the pilot — have no idea whether they've been brought in for a landing from the tower they can see out their window, or from this hidden, remote center more than a 100 miles away.

aviation

sweden

In the U.S., I experienced my share of invisibility. And my minority women friends there tell me they've also experienced it.

For me, one example was at work. Some colleagues were putting together a project highlighting the accomplishments of a group. But I wasn't included in the presentation, despite belonging to that work group.

Then someone higher up — I'm not sure who — decided the project needed to show "diversity" in the workplace. And so, I was eventually asked to participate.

I was game, did my bit and even teased my colleagues about making me the "token minority." They responded with embarrassment and self-deprecating comments, and we merrily went back to working together.

Asia

On India's Trains, Seeking Safety In The Women's Compartment

I must add a line here in defense of all the people who wittingly or unwittingly made sure I wasn't invisible for most of my time in the U.S. I mostly felt supported and encouraged by numerous colleagues and friends. An experience of significant visibility, I'd say.

Still, it was hard not to notice the times where I was overlooked or my work underappreciated. And I'm not alone. This problem has been documented in studies, especially on African American women. Take this 2010 study for example, which shows how black women go "unnoticed" and "unheard."

Back here in India, I find myself aching for invisibility — not when hailing a cab though, like Kaling. That would be no good.

Opinion

For Indian Women, Teasing Is No Laughing Matter

But when I'm out and about in New Delhi, I wish I could go about my business unnoticed. That's because being visible comes with a certain risk of violence, especially in a city like New Delhi, often called the rape capital of India.

Public spaces here often have different rules for men and women. Men outnumber women, and there are liberties a man can take that women still can't.

For instance, a man can loiter. A woman can't — at least, not without drawing stares from men and assumptions about the woman's character being "loose." It's a guaranteed way to draw all the creeps in the vicinity.

Goats and Soda

India's New Comic Book Hero Fights Rape, Rides On The Back Of A Tiger

A man can go for a walk, anywhere and at any time of the day. A woman can't.

A man can walk out of the house wearing almost anything he wants. Indian men often wear shorts, lungis (wrap skirts for men), or or even no shirt at all. Nobody raises an eyebrow.

A woman doesn't have that freedom. Each time I step out of the house, I have to consider carefully what I'm wearing. Is it too tight? Is it too revealing? Is it going to draw lewd stares and comments from men? There are no specific rules, so to speak. But anything that's too revealing and modern — shorts, short skirts, tank tops — is bound to draw unwanted attention.

When I was younger, I didn't care. I wore what I wanted, despite the stares. Now, in my mid-30s, I no longer want my clothes to be a potential risk to my own safety, so I worry about my wardrobe.

An invisibility cloak would definitely come in handy here in New Dehli. I could wear it and go wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted. And I could remove it when I needed to be visible, say, when hailing that cab.

But I recognize that invisibility isn't the answer. Only when more and more women step out into public spaces here can we hope to make spaces safer for Indian women. It will take time and maybe a few more generations. But, I think, it's the only way to go.

And actually, when you think about, the situation in New Delhi isn't that different from that in the U.S. Only by persisting in workplaces and public spaces, and making sure we are seen and heard, can we hope for a day when women of all colors feel more visible.

Going about one's life as though one's invisible, is definitely not the answer. Right Mindy?

mindy kaling

women's rights

minorities

India