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. This is joint work with K. Karabina, P. Longa, C. Gebotys, J. López, D. Hankerson, A. Menezes, E. Knapp, F. Rodríguez-Henríquez, L. Fuentes-Castañeda, J.-L. Beuchat, J. Detrey and N. Estibals.