For T’s next issue, I contributed to a story about censorship, for which the artist Barbara Kruger created this original artwork, “Untitled (Out of Mouth).” I spoke to the filmmaker John Waters, 79, whose third feature, “Pink Flamingos,” which debuted in 1972 — and which includes scenes of unsimulated fellatio and the human consumption of dog feces — was compared by the Detroit Free Press to a “septic tank explosion,” and has been occasionally banned in parts of the United States. “When people get their books banned today,” he told me, “I always say, ‘Be glad!’ It’ll be in the front of the bookstore by the cash register in the banned books section, not in the gay section next to true crime by the bathroom.” I also spoke to the artist Dread Scott, 60, who, at age 24, participated in a 1989 show at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with an installation titled “What Is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?” which required visitors to step on one in order to answer that question. President George H.W. Bush called the work “disgraceful,” and Scott received multiple death threats. Several months later, Congress passed an amendment, the Flag Protection Act of 1989, making the deliberate placement of a flag on the ground a criminal offense. Scott and a few friends and activists responded by burning flags on the steps of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. (Their arrest led to a 1990 Supreme Court ruling that the federal law against desecrating the flag was unconstitutional.) “The world is intolerable as it is,” Scott said when we spoke in May. “Make art about it.” Elsewhere in the package, seven other artists and writers — Andres Serrano, Karen Finley, Khaled Hosseini, Geraldine Brooks, Art Spiegelman, Kate Bornstein and Moisés Kaufman — share their experience with American censorship and remind us, as my colleague M.H. Miller writes, why artists make art in the first place.