Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht alleged to have hired hit men and attracted federal agents to his side

Princess Bride character). The site grew at a tremendous pace, quickly becoming a $1.2 billion enterprise where you could buy or sell drugs, hacking software, forged passports, counterfeit cash, guns, grenades, and poisons. The Silk Road soon caught the attention of the Feds, who embarked on an epic two-year manhunt for the site’s proprietor. Ulbricht, in the meantime, struggled to maintain control of his double life and his marketplace, which he originally started to prove that legalizing drugs could make society safer. He gradually abandoned his libertarian ideals to rule Silk Road with increasingly authoritarian force. At one point, he engaged the services of hired hit men to take out employees he felt had wronged him. Soon, some of the Federal agents who were supposed to be hunting for Ulbricht were lured into the dark world and switched sides to join him. NICK BILTON is a special correspondent for Vanity Fair, where he writes about technology, business, and culture, and a contributor at CNBC. He is the bestselling author of Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal (The Wall Street Journal Reader’s Choice “Best Book of 2013”), which has been optioned by Lionsgate and is currently being turned into a television series. He was a columnist for the New York Times for almost a decade. -o YOUR BRAIN IS A TIME MACHINE The Neuroscience and Physics of Time By Dean Buonomano [World English — W. W. Norton, China— Huazhang, Audio — Audible; Manuscript; Pub Date: April 2017; 304 pages] Pioneering neuroscientist Dean Buonomano examines how the brain tells time, predicts the future, and understands the past in a book that straddles the fields of physics, psychology and neuroscience. Few questions are as perplexing and profound as those that relate to ttme. Philosophers ponder what time is. Physicists grapple with why time appears to be a one-way street, and debate whether it is a single lonely point or a full-blown dimension. Neuroscientists and psychologists struggle to understand what it means to "feel" the passage of time and how the brain tells it. Time 1s also key to the question of free will: is the future an open path, or is 1t preordained by the past? The brain, argues Buonomano, is at its core a time machine. It 1s the brain's ability to anticipate the actions of prey, predators, and mates, and to predict when events will occur in a dynamically changing world, that ultimately translate into the evolutionary currency of survival and reproduction. The ability of animals to predict the future culminated with Homo sapiens' capacity to grasp the concept of time. Only then were we able to craft a blade for future use, or plant a seed to quench projected hunger. Your Brain is a Time Machine explains that, in the end, our intuitions and theories about time reveal as much about the architecture and limitations of our brains as they do about the true nature of time. DEAN BUONOMANDO is a professor in the Departments of Neurobiology and Psychology at UCLA, and an investigator in the Integrative Center for Learning and Memory. He is the author of Brain Bugs: How the Brain’s Flaws Shape Our Lives, which was a Wall Street Journal bestseller, and his research has been highlighted in many national and international magazines and newspapers, including Discover, Newsweek, Scientific American, Zeit, Cosmos, Hérzu Wissen, and the New Yorker. Brockman, Inc. Frankfurt 2016 Hotlist -3- HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_025149