The White House ballroom project is wildly unpopular. Donald Trump doesn’t care. Ben Terris reports on Trump’s obsessive bid for architectural immortality, which is now barreling toward completion, and captures the breathtaking sycophancy required to work for this president:

“We had asphalt going into here,” Trump says, standing on the pathway leading to the residence of the White House. “Now you have the best stone.” He points at a pile of square-cut granite—the type being used to replace the asphalt walkway—and looks to his communications director, Steven Cheung, who is accompanying us on this impromptu tour of the White House grounds en route to the construction site.

“That’s some stone, huh, Steven?” he says.

“It’s incredible,” Cheung concurs.

“Look at the thickness of it,” Trump says. “Normally, you use one inch, as thin as you can. It’s the White House—I said, ‘Fuck it, what’s the best you have?’ They said, ‘We have one that’s four inches.’”

“You’re restoring glory to the White House,” Cheung says, shaking his head in apparent awe.

I’d be lying if I said I understand everything Michael Levin believes. But I’m also not alone; sometimes his own colleagues can’t even follow his arguments. Elizabeth Weil’s profile of the renegade (and genius) biologist bridges that gap, sketching out Levin’s research and claims in a way that’s just grokkable enough to blow your mind. I mean this as a true compliment: When’s the last time we had a genuine mad scientist on our hands?

Critics accuse Levin of all kinds of teleological crimes — making unfalsifiable claims, using words in ways that render those words meaningless. Levin is unfazed. In his talks, he tries to disarm his detractors by preempting the accusation that he’s nuts: “I have some unusual things to say and then I have some crazy things to say”; “So this is a kind of crazy claim I’m making.” His true retort is his wet lab. There, at the bench, he’s working to prove his metaphysics by running old-school (in a way) biological experiments. He studies flatworms with two heads. Frogs with eyes on their stomachs. Little round creatures called xenobots, synthesized from frog skin cells. They swim like tiny Pac-Men. They do not exist in nature.

“The only thing that ever settles arguments is technology,” Levin tells me, a line he borrowed from biophysicist Chris Fields. “People have been saying for thousands of years what they think” about minds, consciousness, souls, energy fields. “What I can contribute is ways to test some of those things.”