The Whistleblowing Couriers

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I would like to thank the two individuals whose humanity ensured this book would be finished.

I would like to thank public libraries and their librarians and independent bookstores and their guardians for being my timeless sanctuaries.

I would like to thank the teachers, the instructors, the graduate students, and the professors who taught me the knowledge necessary for this book, who challenged me to be a better writer, and who introduced me to new literature and new ideas.

I would like to thank Blue Scholars. Geo and Sabzi's music, especially their music videos for "Joe Metro" and "Back Home", continuously helped me to keep on writing through the darkest, most difficult moments of this book. In the same vein, I would like to thank A Tribe Called Red's music video for "Stadium Pow Wow", featuring Black Bear, as well as Prolific The Rapper's updated music video cover, "Black Snakes".

I would like to thank the First Amendment and the ACLU; investigative journalists; whistleblowers and their protectors; National Geographic; Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders; Howard Zinn and A People's History of the United States; dictionaries, thesauruses, and atlases; the Internet; Jeff Madrick's "The Fall and Rise of Occupy Wall Street" (Harper's Magazine, March 2013); Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Jeremy Scahill, Ben Anderson, and Amy Goodman; VICE News, The Guardian, The Intercept, Democracy Now!, and Scroll; "Invictus"; Edward Snowden; Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch; and The George Washington University's National Security Archive.

I would also like to thank Ann McGovern's The Defenders; E. L. Konigsburg's The View From Saturday; Jon Stewart; Stephen Colbert; Aasif Mandvi and Kal Penn; Mira Nair, Deepa Mehta, and Nandita Das; Satyajit Ray and Akira Kurosawa; Jehane Noujaim; Jason Porath's Rejected Princesses; The Center for Responsive Politics' Open Secrets; Wikipedia; The Onion; Joseph Heller's Catch-22; NPR Music's World section and Tiny Desk Concerts; Steve McCurry; Magnum Photos; Russmus' translations of Kino's music; The Criterion Collection; independent theaters; Chuck Dixon and Steve Epting's El Cazador; TURN: Washington's Spies; She's Beautiful When She's Angry; Adrishya; the Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour; Julie McCarthy; Soutik Biswas; Rega Jha; Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting; Lucy Lawless' Warrior Women; Gillian Anderson; All India Bakchod; Drunk History; Dr. Lindsey Doe and Sexplanations; Dub Sharma's "Azadi featuring Kanhaiya Kumar and Friends", as well as Creative Commoners' music video; the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters sans frontières; The Nib; the Encyclopædia Britannica; Google Maps and Google Street View; Atlas Obscura; John Oliver; Smithsonian; the Civil Rights Memorial; the National Women's History Museum; The Nation; and Jacobin.

Glenn Greenwald's "The FBI's Hunt for Two Missing Piglets Reveals the Federal Cover-Up of Barbaric Factory Farms" (The Intercept, October 5th, 2017) directly inspired and influenced a portion of Chapter Eight, "Concerning Violence".

I designed the cover using Canva, IngramSpark, and Skim.

While it is impossible to fully document all the infinite sources that influenced my writing of this novel, I must attempt to do so. So, in the spirit of Antonio Gramsci, I would like to credit, in addition to the direct and indirect traces referenced in this book, the following influences: Dempsey Parr's World History Encyclopedia; Mary Pope Osborne's Magic Tree House series; My First Amazing World Explorer 2.0; Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?; Dorling Kindersley reference books; Hergé's Tintin series; Liberty's Kids; H. G. Wells' The Time Machine and The Invisible Man; Civilization IV; Age of Empires III; Anthony Horowitz's Alex Rider series (through Scorpia Rising) and The House of Silk; Robert Muchamore's CHERUB series (through Black Friday); the Bourne trilogy; Christopher Nolan; America 2049; Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits; Nathan Burney's The Illustrated Guide to Law; John Denver's testimony before the PMRC; Suheir Hammad's "First Writing Since"; Rabindranath Tagore's "Where the Mind is Without Fear"; G. Willow Wilson and M. K. Perker's Cairo; Max Brooks' World War Z; Dan Bortolitti's Hope in Hell: Inside the World of Doctors Without Borders, Living in Emergency: Stories of Doctors Without Borders, and BBC Panorama's Ebola Frontline; Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave and Hunger; The Lives of Others; Manuscripts Don't Burn; Shahid; Sophie Scholl: The Final Days; Enemy of the Reich: The Noor Inayat Khan Story; Richard Preston's The Hot Zone; Tim Hamilton's Fahrenheit 451: The Authorized Adaptation; John le Carré's A Most Wanted Man; The Bridge; Agent Carter; Sherlock; Luther; Key & Peele; Kalki Koechlin's spoken word performances on womanhood and "The Printing Machine"; Transhuman Collective's "No Country for Women"; How to Survive a Plague; Virunga; Raoul Peck's Lumumba and I Am Not Your Negro; Democracy Spring; and The Americans.

And I would like to thank G.