As we round out yet another year of this pandemic, clinical microbiologists have not slowed down. We have not slowed down in our response to the pandemic or other day-to-day testing needs, despite the constant reagent backorders and personnel shortages, and equally as important, we have not slowed down in publishing high quality, informative and clinically relevant papers, which have really spanned the gamut of clinical microbiology - from antimicrobial susceptibility testing, to next generation sequencing assays and AI, to evaluation of new high throughput assays for a variety of pathogens, the field continues to expand at an impressive pace. Three Journal of Clinical Microbiology (JCM) editors discuss some of their favorite and most impactful papers published in the Journal in 2021. Welcome to Editors in Conversation. This episode is brought to you by the Journal of Clinical Microbiology, available at https://jcm.asm.org and on https://twitter.com/JClinMicro and is supported by the American Society for Microbiology, which publishes JCM.