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For more of our reporting on this story, please see our recent column in the New York Times Magazine, and the latest episode of This American Life.

This morning, we reported on a charity called GiveDirectly that's trying to help poor people in the developing world in an unusual way: It gives them money with no strings attached. This is a somewhat radical idea in the charity world.

Most charities, of course, get money from donors and spend it on things they think will help people. They build schools, provide medicine or give people cows.

When we were in Kenya recently, we visited a village where people had been given cows by a group called Heifer International. And, we can report, these were very impressive cows. They looked strong and healthy.

And, like lots of charities, Heifer also spends money to provide training. Working with another group called Send a Cow, Heifer teaches people to make sure their cows get the right nutrition and to keep detailed logs tracking milk production. People visited the village to make sure everything was going well. And all this really helped. One woman told us her cow produces 15 times as much milk as local cows — and she sells most of the milk.

That's a traditional charity. GiveDirectly, on the other hand, takes money from donors and just gives it to poor people. (For more on how GiveDirectly works, see our story from this morning.) This is something of a challenge to other charities. Paul Niehaus, one of the group's founders, is pretty blunt about it.

"We would like to see organizations make the case that they can do more good for the poor with a dollar than the poor can do for themselves," he says. "And I think some may be able to make a convincing case. But if you go to the websites, today I don't think you're going to be seeing that argument being made. Nobody even bothers."

Neihaus says charities should be clear about how much they're spending and how much it's helping. And to figure this out, he says, charities should do actual experiments. In GiveDirectly's case, independent researchers are conducting a randomized, controlled trial. Basically, there are two groups of villagers. One group gets money, the other doesn't. The researchers do a detailed survey to compare the two groups and see what difference getting money makes. The results from the study are due out later this year. And they'll be made public.

If you were trying to compare giving cows and training with giving cash, you could take the same approach. Give people in one village cows and training; in the next village over, take the money you would have spent on cows and training and just give it to people.

Not surprisingly, Niehaus loved this idea. We called up Heifer International to see what it thought, and we talked to Elizabeth Bintliff, vice president of Heifer's Africa programs.

"As an African woman, that sounds to me like a terrible idea," she said. "It sounds like an experiment, and we're not about experiments. These are lives of real people." The world is "just not that linear," she said. "It's not an equation. It's an ecosystem."

Still, she said, Heifer has worked with independent researchers to measure its programs. "The University of Western Michigan evaluates Heifer's projects and has found that there's very positive return to families in terms of income, nutrition and other indicators," she told us.

Bintliff said she could send us those evaluations. After the interview, though, we got an email from a Heifer official. After thanking us for our interest she wrote: "As the sources cited are unpublished, we're not able to provide further information publicly at this time."

Until pretty recently, the charity world has been about doing stuff that helps, without really asking: How much does it help exactly, and how much does it cost? But there does seem to be this shift that's starting to happen. Philanthropy is getting nerdier; people are paying more attention to data.

Last year, the GiveDirectly guys gave a presentation at Google's corporate charity office. They didn't show any pictures of people. But they showed charts and studies and numbers. The people at Google were impressed. They gave $2.4 million to GiveDirectly and told them to figure out how to give money to lots more people.

Apple unveiled its replacement for the iPhone 5 – one for the top end of the market that features an innovative new fingerprint security device, a faster processor and longer battery life and a second budget phone that will retail for as low as $99.

CEO Tim Cook was joined by other Apple executives at the Cupertino, Calif., headquarters for the long-anticipated and hyped announcement of the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c.

The iPhone 5s will include Touch ID, a new home button that reads a user's fingerprint to unlock the phone instead of relying on a cumbersome passcode. It includes a new, 64-bit processor, called the A7, which Apple says will be "up to twice as fast" as the A6 processor in the current iPhone 5.

The 5s will be available in silver, gold and "space grey" and provide battery life "as good as or better than the iPhone 5" — 250 standby hours as opposed to the 225 standby hours for the iPhone 5.

The iPhone 5s also features an advanced camera and a "motion-co-processor" for sports and exercise applications. The $16 gigabyte version will sell for $199; the 32 gigabyte for $299 and a 64-gigabyte version for $399. The iPhone 5s will release on Sept. 20.

The new device is 56 times as fast as the original iPhone released in June 2007, Cook said.

The iPhone 5c will largely match the capabilities of the current iPhone 5, but at a lower price. It will sport a plastic cases with the option for a variety of colors. A 16 gigabyte version of the iPhone 5c will sell for just $99, while a 32-gigabyte version will retail for $199.

Phil Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide marketing at Apple said the new iPhone 5s is "the most forward-looking phone we have ever created."

The budget 5c, which still uses the A6 processor, will be available for preorder on Sept. 13 in five colors — green, blue, yellow, pink or white.

Cook called the phone "absolutely gorgeous" and "more fun and colorful" than any other iPhone.

Apple's new iOS 7 operating system will be available for free download on Sept. 18 and will be compatible with all devices that are iPhone 4 or more advanced. Craig Federinghi, head of software at Apple, said "downloading the iOS 7 will be "like getting an all new device."

With increasingly stiff competition from smartphones running Google's Android operating system – especially Samsung's Galaxy line, Apple will be banking on success for its newly unveiled line.

The cheaper iPhone 5c, seems to be aimed partly at the overseas market, where the iPhone's premium price tag has turned off cost-conscious consumers. NPR's Krishnadev Calamur, writing for the Parallels blog, says Apple has been losing marketshare in China. As Krishnadev notes, China represents the world's largest smartphone market, but the less expensive Samsung models and a phone made by Xiaomi "a company that's dismissed by some as an Apple knockoff" have been making steady inroads.

After years of sticking close to home, more Americans are eager to shake off the recession's remnants and have a final summer adventure, according to experts who track travel.

"We've noticed that vacation plans increased quite a bit in August," compared with June, said Chris Christopher, an economist who focuses on consumer markets for IHS Global Insight, a forecasting firm.

Christopher said he looked more deeply into data released Tuesday by the Conference Board, a business research group. The Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Index showed a slight gain overall. But the random sample of consumers reflected a notable uptick in travel plans in recent weeks.

"It's somewhat tied to gas prices," Christopher said. Back in mid-July, gas prices were running around $3.68 a gallon. But this month, they eased down by about a dime a gallon, according to the website Gasbuddy.com.

As gas prices have settled back, consumers have started to feel a bit more comfortable, Christopher said. "And nothing really bad happened in August to get people worried, so consumer confidence is relatively elevated," he said.

That upbeat assessment of travel plans is in line with what AAA Travel sees happening. The auto club estimates 34 million Americans will travel more than 50 miles from home over the long Labor Day holiday weekend — a 4.2 percent jump over last year and the highest number since before the recession began in late 2007.

The Two-Way

Economy Was Stronger Than Thought In Second Quarter

On his grandmother's faith and political beliefs

"What [a] tormenting situation, to be an intellectual woman of her generation and grow up with this enormous identity, but it was an identity founded on belief that she couldn't sustain. She was violently secular. She loved culture and she loved books and all sorts of things that Jews care for, but she couldn't believe in the Jewish God, or any God, and she felt terrible about it.

"She felt enraged that other people didn't see the obviousness all at once, but she substituted, I think, at some point, other kinds of beliefs — belief in ... humanism, and I think if she was at any point seriously a Communist ... that was a belief. And as anybody who studied the history of communist movements knows ... it's analogous [to religion]; it draws passion out of people and sometimes irrational passion.

"So all of these things are muddled up for her. And maybe some of those later beliefs become disappointed, violently disappointed, as well. Other gods die: The god [of] literature fails her, the god of socialism fails her.

" ... I was very interested in the book in writing ... about someone who was so into so many kinds of theoretical freedoms. She embraced such diversity. ... Diversity was heroic to her."

On growing up on a commune where nudity was common

"You shouldn't overlook the human ability to partition things and make special categories and create exemptions.

" ... For me there were the typical teenage fascinations with the mysteries of the bodies of the girls I was going to school with, where to glimpse a bra strap might've blown my mind. And at the same time, I'd go home and I'd go up to my dad's studio and sit there with him and draw from a naked model for a few hours. But that was art; that was another thing.

"Or I might take a shower with my cousin at her commune because they had a group shower and that was interesting to me, too, and probably titillating. But I kept these things very tightly organized in order to function. So each thing was its own separate reality."

The Record

Jonathan Lethem On The Song That Puts The Fear Into 'Fear Of Music'