The Supreme Court Says Congress Can't Make States Dance to Its Tune
In Thomas Mann’s haunting short story, “Mario and the Magician,” a young Italian man challenges a traveling hypnotist to a contest. Can the sinister Cavaliere Cipolla make him dance against his will? The young man loses. After a few passes by Cipolla, “he lifted his arms, then his knees, his joints quite suddenly relaxed, he flung his legs and danced, and amid bursts of applause the Cavaliere led him to join the row of puppets on the stage.”
Mann’s narrator muses that “it was the negative character of the young man’s fighting position which was his undoing. It is likely that not willing is not a practicable state of mind; not to want to do something may be in the long run a mental content impossible to subsist on. Between not willing a certain thing and not willing at all—in other
