Pairings have been receiving significant research interest as a building block for cryptographers, but their efficiency can be critical for the real-world deployment of their powerful applications. In this talk, we describe several recent developments for accelerating serial and parallel implementations of cryptographic pairings in the asymmetric setting: lazy reduction in extension fields, faster compressed squaring in cyclotomic subgroups, notes on curve selection at higher security levels and how to split a pairing computation among multiple processor cores. We also summarize the current situation with symmetric pairings.