An Off Topic podcast special, featuring Mad Men, the rise of emoji, public shaming and the strange story of Louis la Roc

In the first of two special editions of the Off Topic podcast, Fionn Davenport, Laurence Mackin and Hugh Linehan look back at some of the best bits from the year's podcasts and discuss what has since changed around the subjects.

First up is a section with author Adam Sternbergh on the rapid evolution of a wordless tongue – emoji. Since Apple introduced it as a readily accessible emoji keyboard in iOS 5 in 2011 for the iPhone, it has become essential to modern mobile and text conversation. So could it turn into a language in its own right?

The second part features academic Jennifer Jacquetwho argues that shame is necessary for the smooth running of society. In this essay on Wired she argues that: "The discussion about 21st-century shaming usually turns to cases in which an otherwise well-behaved person posts a tweet or photograph that results in excessive punishment by an anonymous and bloodthirsty online crowd which ruins that person's life for a while. Many people, myself included, object to this form of vigilantism. But other examples of shaming - singling out big banks for environmental destruction, exposing countries for refusing to end forced labour or calling out denialists who undermine action on climate change - challenge the mistreated tweeter as shaming's stereotype. What shaming largely is, after all, is not necessarily what shaming might be."

We also take a look at perhaps the strangest book of last year: Louis La Roc's Numb, in which the author says he has ghostwritten the true story of a well-known but anonymised war correspondent, "Alan Buckby", who had lived a double life as a rapist and killer. The brutal and graphic book is a particularly bleak read – but several of its facts don't stand up. La Roc's real name is Colin Carroll. He's a Corkman who worked in the legal profession and also tried a career as a sumo wrestler. On the podcast, he insists that the book is real, yet he struggles to explain several key points, though when asked how he managed to research and write it in such a short space of time, he did give one memorable explanation: "For Christmas this year you had Christmas turkey," he said. "For Christmas this year I had tears."

And finally, we take a look at one of the best shows on television in recent years, and one which aired its last episode. Mad Men's final hurrah was screened in May, and earlier in the year Tom Fitzgerald of the website Tom & Lorenzo talked us through their brilliant, forensically detailed analysis of the show's costumes, what they tell us about the characters, and what they indicated about the show's final trajectory.