[1][2] Panero was born in New York City, and grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
In 1999 he worked in Gstaad, Switzerland as a writing assistant to William F. Buckley Jr on his novel Spytime: The Undoing of James Jesus Angleton (Harcourt, 2000).
[12] Panero is the co-editor of The Dartmouth Review Pleads Innocent, an anthology of the newspaper published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in Spring 2006.
He is a contributor to Counterpoints: 25 Years of The New Criterion on Culture and the Arts (Ivan R. Dee, 2007), The State of Art Criticism, edited by James Elkins and Michael Newman (Routledge, 2008), and "Future Tense: The Lessons of Culture in an Age of Upheaval" (Encounter Books, 2012).
[13] In June 2019, he appeared on Tucker Carlson's Fox News to argue against the metric system.