The Assignment with Audie Cornish
Oct 25, 2026 · 53 min · 15 segments
Audie and Ari recently joined one of their favorite people, writer and journalist Anne Helen Peterson, on her podcast Culture Study. They talked code switching, gay slang, Southie accents, swearing…
Audie CornishHost
Anne Helen PetersonGuest
Ari ShapiroGuest
So the subject of this podcast is code switching, which I think some people, the connotation really is about like code switching yourself to make yourself more amenable to a more dominant culture in whatever form that might take.
Code switching can be about... what you talk about in the office versus what you talk about with your friends.
right? Like much more dialectically, like how you flatten your accent, how you do all these things, but like just the different self-presentation that we do all the time, right? And is there any other way besides just our voices, right? Things that you have noted in yourself that you code switch on a regular basis?
I mean, I think the way we dress says so much about us, which, you know, for the four years that I was a White House correspondent, I wore a suit and tie to work every day.
Like obviously I had seen you in a social context, but I think in my head I was like, we're at work, then we're not at work.
But like, I didn't realize how much of your work life you really did spend like pretty trussed up.
And as a host of All Things Considered, I started wearing a jacket and tie to work most days.
And you don't want to be the dinosaur dressing for the office of 1990, whatever, you know, or the early 2000s.
So when you ask how do we code switch besides like audio, vocal, the words we use and the way we use them, to me, the biggest thing that comes to mind is how we dress.
And Audie and I have talked about for engagement party, what do we want to wear? How do we want to look? Because it's a YouTube show in addition to being a podcast.
And we did our first photo shoot with, like, I was wearing a suit and a white shirt and no tie.
So the subject of this podcast is code switching, which I think some people, the connotation really is about like code switching yourself to make yourself more amenable to a more dominant culture in whatever form that might take.
Code switching can be about... what you talk about in the office versus what you talk about with your friends.
right? Like much more dialectically, like how you flatten your accent, how you do all these things, but like just the different self-presentation that we do all the time, right? And is there any other way besides just our voices, right? Things that you have noted in yourself that you code switch on a regular basis?
I mean, I think the way we dress says so much about us, which, you know, for the four years that I was a White House correspondent, I wore a suit and tie to work every day.
Like obviously I had seen you in a social context, but I think in my head I was like, we're at work, then we're not at work.
But like, I didn't realize how much of your work life you really did spend like pretty trussed up.
And as a host of All Things Considered, I started wearing a jacket and tie to work most days.
And you don't want to be the dinosaur dressing for the office of 1990, whatever, you know, or the early 2000s.
So when you ask how do we code switch besides like audio, vocal, the words we use and the way we use them, to me, the biggest thing that comes to mind is how we dress.
And Audie and I have talked about for engagement party, what do we want to wear? How do we want to look? Because it's a YouTube show in addition to being a podcast.
And we did our first photo shoot with, like, I was wearing a suit and a white shirt and no tie.
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