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The Internal Revenue Service is taking a closer look at the finances of some 1,300 nonprofit organizations, including unions, trade associations, and the type of dark-money groups that controversially spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the 2012 elections. That includes Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS, the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity, the US Chamber of Commerce, and the pro-Obama outfit Priorities USA, all of which keep their donors secret.

The IRS' is asking these groups to answer a questionnaire (PDF) explaining how they spent their money, how their top staffers were paid, if they flew first-class or charter, any perks they received, and more. The taxman's request for more information comes as campaign finance reformers, disclosure advocates, and at least one angry lawmaker, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), pressure the IRS to crack down on big-spending nonprofits like Crossroads GPS, which spent at least $67 million on politics during the 2012 campaign. Levin, who is retiring after his current term, said that a priority of his remaining time in Congress is investigating "the failure of the IRS to enforce our tax laws and stem the flood of hundreds of millions of secret dollars flowing into our elections, eroding public confidence in our democracy."

Here's more from NPR on the IRS' latest move on dark money:

The IRS calls the move a "compliance check." It asks a wide range of questions about a group's finances and internal structure. Some of the information will turn up, eventually, in a group's tax return on the Form 990. But other intriguing information will not. For instance, how did the group set the compensation for its most highly paid officers? Did it give them first-class or charter travel? How about country-club memberships? Any other perks?

The agency has targeted groups that are "self-declared." That is, they claim they qualify for 501(c) tax-exempt status, but they've never filed the application with the IRS. That lets them avoid the application form asking the group to describe its proposed tax-exempt activities.

The IRS says the questionnaire is meant "to help us understand" the self-declared groups and to learn "how they satisfy their exemption requirements."

But the IRS may be weighing other factors, too. The questionnaire's most explicit questions are about 501(c)(4) political activity, and the document follows months of critics' complaints that the IRS has treated 501(c)(4) groups too gently.

Unfortunately, the IRS won't disclose respondents' answers to the questionnaire. But with this questionnaire—and with one IRS official's pledge last fall that the agency would scrutinize dark-money nonprofits—it's obvious that the agency is digging into the issue of dark money.

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Danny Torrance: Mind blown. The Shining

Stanley Kubrick's classic has been terrifying, thrilling, and utterly confusing fans for over 30 years, leaving viewers groping for answers. What really possessed Jack Torrance? Why did pathological perfectionist Kubrick leave in obvious continuity errors? What's up with the man-bear-pig? Obsessive fans are still trying to figure out exactly what went down at the Overlook Hotel, zealously poring over the placement of every prop and examining every frame of the film.

Room 237, a new documentary by Rodney Ascher, examines a handful of Shining conspiracy theories posited by both academic cinephiles and tormented laymen. Ascher has his own take—he sees the film as a Faustian homage, pointing to Jack's deal with the devil for just one glass of beer—but says all of these readings carry weight. "A lot of the ideas can be pretty outrageous, but when you're talking about a symbolic interpretation of a Freudian horror movie, even things on the surface are pretty crazy," Ascher said. Here are six of the strangest, most chilling theories about the true meaning of the Kubrick classic:

1. It's about the massacre of the American Indians.

Scatman Crothers as Dick Halloran and a can of Calumet The Shining/photo illustration Maggie Caldwell

Stuart Ullman, the hotel's manager, gives the Torrance family a tour of the grounds just before vacating the Overlook for the winter and leaving them to their fate. He casually tosses out that the hotel just happens to sit atop an Indian burial ground. (Not like that's ever been a problem before.) The film is loaded with Native American symbology, from the Navajo wall hangings in the great room to the pantry stockpile of Calumet baking soda cans, all bearing the brand's iconic logo: a Native man in warrior headdress. The word "calumet," notes one theorist, means "ceremonial pipe," and the cans appear several times when characters are communicating telepathically with each other or plotting with the dead. According to this theory, Danny's infamous visions of gushing red liquid streaming from the elevators actually represents the souls buried deep beneath the hotel, with the elevator cabin dropping down into the basement like a bucket in a well, delivering a bounty of blood upon its return to the surface. Gross.

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Ross Douthat on the coming liberal victory over gay marriage:

Whether people think they’re on the side of God or of History, magnanimity has rarely been a feature of the culture war.

That's true! Also true of practically every other disagreement, big or small, among human beings. The exceptions are rare enough that they usually become famous.

In any case, what Douthat wants lefties to magnanimously acknowledge is the possibility that the growing acceptance of gay marriage, even if it's a net positive, might have contributed to things like the decline in traditional marriage rates and the rise in out-of-wedlock births. He concedes, of course, that those are long-term trends and the Great Recession has made them worse:

But there is also a certain willed naïveté to the idea that the advance of gay marriage is unrelated to any other marital trend. For 10 years, America’s only major public debate about marriage and family has featured one side [...] pressing the case that modern marriage has nothing to do with the way human beings reproduce themselves, that the procreative understanding of the institution was founded entirely on prejudice, and that the shift away from a male-female marital ideal is analogous to the end of segregation.

Two comments. First, I think this is ironic. My sense of the debate is that the procreation argument was introduced by opponents of same-sex marriage, not supporters. Those advocating SSM just wanted gays and lesbians to be able to marry each other. It was opponents, after realizing that Old Testament jeremiads weren't cutting it any more, who began claiming that SSM should remain banned because gays couldn't have children. This turned out to be both a tactical and strategic disaster, partly because the argument was so transparently silly (what about old people? what about women who had hysterectomies? etc.) and partly because it suggested that SSM opponents didn't have any better arguments to offer. But disaster or not, they're the ones responsible for making this into a cornerstone of the anti-SSM debates in the aughts. Without that, I doubt that most ordinary people would ever have connected gay marriage to procreation within straight marriages in the first place. If this really has had an impact on traditional marriage, the anti-SSM forces have mostly themselves to blame.

But they probably shouldn't blame themselves very much, because I don't think the demographic details back up Douthat's case. Take a look at the demographic groups where marriage has declined: very famously, it's been among poor and working class women, and especially among poor and working class black women. I'll concede that I might be off base here, but I think Douthat is assuming that recondite arguments over procreation and gay marriage, which are common in his highly-educated social group, are also common in the groups where marriage has declined. I doubt that very much. What's more, support for gay marriage is lowest in precisely the groups that have abandoned traditional marriage in the largest numbers. If the procreation argument were really affecting marriage rates, you'd expect to see the biggest impact in the groups where this argument is most commonly advanced, and in the groups that most strongly support gay marriage. Instead we've seen the opposite.

The economic and social forces behind the decline in marriage are decades old: stagnant incomes for men, growing incomes for women, an incarceration explosion that's left black male communities decimated, and a feminist revolution that made single parenthood more socially acceptable. Against that backdrop, I guess I find it unlikely that a fairly esoteric debate about procreation, which took place mostly among the chattering classes, had a significant impact on the people who are actually abandoning marriage. I'm open to evidence to the contrary, though.

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Karl Lagerfeld, creative director of Chanel. Pix Planete/ZUMA Press

Last week, Friday Night Lights creator and journalist Buzz Bissinger set the internet on fire with a candid, 6,000-word confessional about his out-of-control addiction to high-end shopping published in GQ.

Bissinger's obsession—forty-one pairs of leather pants? A $22,000 jacket?—is so outlandish that it almost seems like a ruse. Yet there are many more weird stories woven into what we wear, why we wear it, and what happens to it when we clean out the closet.

For more MoJo staffers' long-form favorites, visit our longreads.com page. Take a look at some of our own reporters' longreads here and follow @longreads and @motherjones on Twitter for the latest.

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