How does a single word become the title of a landmark 1956 poem, a 2015 British slasher film, a 1986 fantasy novel, a K-pop EP, a New York arts festival, a comedy podcast app, and a 2023 puzzle video game? Working from nothing more than a Wikipedia disambiguation page, this episode treats the list of everything called Howl as a map of human psychology over the last seventy years, starting with the biology of the sound itself: a sustained canine vocalization designed to travel for miles and trigger a primal response in anyone who hears it.

The conversation moves through Allen Ginsberg weaponizing the word against 1950s conformity, Diana Wynne Jones naming a volatile wizard Howl, a Hunt Saboteurs Association magazine adopting the cry of the animals it protects, and the tonal gulf between a horror film and an arthouse Ginsberg biopic sharing o ...