{"id":270686,"date":"2009-04-30T14:40:50","date_gmt":"2009-04-30T14:40:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2009\/04\/30\/what-makes-a-good-panel\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T17:20:02","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T17:20:02","slug":"what-makes-a-good-panel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2009\/04\/30\/what-makes-a-good-panel\/","title":{"rendered":"What Makes a Good Panel?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This was the question that Leon Neyfakh from the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.observer.com\/2009\/daily-transom\/publishing-gathers-around-dinosaur-pen-literary-gala-guests-discuss-merits-and-pi\"><em>New York Observer<\/em><\/a> asked a few people at the recent <span class=\"caps\">PEN<\/span> Foundation annual gala. The answers aren&#8217;t all that provocative or surprising: Edmund White points out how most panels are &#8220;an exercise of competing egos rather than an effort to communicate or focus on the topic&#8221; and Daniel Menaker (whose <a href=\"http:\/\/www.titlepage.tv\/episodes\/episode-6-national-obsessions-with-carl-hiaasen-benjamin-nugent-ellen-hawley-and-dana-jenni\">Titlepage.tv<\/a> project seems to have gone into permanent hibernation) offers up the excuse that most authors aren&#8217;t good at interacting with the public. <\/p>\n<p>The one comment that I completely agree with is from Rhonda Sherman (organizer of the New Yorker Festival): &#8220;\u201cIn general, it\u2019s not a party unless there\u2019s blood on the floor. There needs to be tension on a panel. You need to have some disagreement. If everyone agrees on the panel, it\u2019s a total snooze-a-thon.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Every panel needs a contrarian to really foster a discussion. Otherwise it&#8217;s easy for these events to devolve into a series of disconnected, individual presentation. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This was the question that Leon Neyfakh from the New York Observer asked a few people at the recent PEN Foundation annual gala. The answers aren&#8217;t all that provocative or surprising: Edmund White points out how most panels are &#8220;an exercise of competing egos rather than an effort to communicate or focus on the topic&#8221; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[1836,22846,22856,22836,22826,5306,22866],"class_list":["post-270686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-cwp","tag-daniel-menaker","tag-edmund-white","tag-leon-neyfakh","tag-new-york-observer","tag-panels","tag-rhonda-sherman"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=270686"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270686\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":353006,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270686\/revisions\/353006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=270686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}