100 Objects #6: "Sharpened Screwdriver"
The episode discusses the 1984 Bernhard Goetz subway shooting and how it was influenced by misinformation and fear. The story of the sharpened screwdriver is used to explore how one narrative can shape public opinion and have lasting effects. The episode is part of the series A History of the United States in 100 Objects, produced by 99% Invisible and BBC Studios.
- ▪The 1984 Bernhard Goetz subway shooting involved four Black teenagers who were perceived as armed criminals in the public imagination.
- ▪The episode explores how misinformation and fear contributed to the events surrounding the shooting.
- ▪The series A History of the United States in 100 Objects examines the history of the US through 100 objects.
99% Invisible files mainly under podcasts. We currently carry 6 of its stories.
Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | 99% Invisible |
| Canonical URL | https://99percentinvisible.org/?p=48221 |
| Publication time | Fri, 26 Jun 2026 07:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-06-26T07:07:29.748Z |
| Last seen | 2026-06-26T07:07:37.918Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 1G5L2qSBgW3T |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Episode Object #6 100 Objects #6: “Sharpened Screwdriver” PlayPause Click to enlarge image History Category History Date 06.26.26 Producer 99PI Add to QueueRemove from QueueDownload Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Leave a Comment In this episode, Roman and historians Heather Ann Thompson and Elliot Williams tell the story of the sharpened screwdriver: the object at the heart of the 1984 Bernhard Goetz subway shooting. In a difficult moment in New York City, four Black teenagers were transformed in the public imagination into armed criminals. What follows is a gripping account of how misinformation takes hold, how fear shapes public opinion, and how one narrative can ripple outward – echoing through decades of similar cases that continue to unfold today.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at 99% Invisible.
