If you’ve ever toasted a business deal in China, you’ll probably have come across baijiu. Yet given this fiery rice wine remains largely unknown abroad, the fact that its producer Kweichow Moutai has become the largest spirits-maker in the world may come as a surprise. After opening its own distilling university in Guizhou, the company is now looking to let its influence spill overseas.

Sunscreen? Check. Sunglasses? Check. Towel? If you’re heading to the Sardinian beach of Stintino, you’d better leave that at home. In a bid to preserve the sand of this beautiful spot, the town’s mayor Antonio Diana has proposed a ban on all towels – accusing them of stealing away precious grains in their fibres. Will this spell the end for territory-grabbing beach wars? Probably not. Folding chairs and mats will be available for hire instead.

Yodelling has found a curious new voice of late. The falsetto-flecked folk-warble will be taught at the University of Lucerne from September. It’s tempting to see the trend as schmaltzy but Volksmusik (traditional German ditties) and its popular progeny schlager (stadium-filling pop) remain big business. Yodelling, eh? It may be something to shout about after all.

James Hyman is a man who loves magazines. And even those of us who have boxes and boxes of print history stashed in our cupboards (well, how can you throw out old copies of George, Talk or The Correspondent Magazine) worry about his habit.

Hyman has more than 120,000 magazines in his collection. He keeps them in an old cannon foundry in London’s Woolwich Arsenal and his Hyman Archive has become a go-to resource for all sorts of people looking for inspiration and the fees paid by these visitors have helped keep it going. But it’s not enough and in February the archive was declared bankrupt.

Yet for the ever-positive Hyman this is only a temporary setback. “Whatever happens, I’ll absolutely carry on,” the avid collector says confidently. “I plan to either buy the assets or start a new company.” If Hyman and his team are sure of anything, it’s that print isn’t dead and neither is the archive.

“James is the trusted custodian of many private collections and we won’t let these donors’ stories and cultural contributions go to waste,” says Tory Turk, the archive’s curator and creative lead. Besides running operations – until recently, at least – she and Hyman have been busy working on a book and plan to open a magazine museum.

Although, if – against our better hope – those stacks of The Face, NME, Mad, Zoom, The New Yorker and more do eventually need a new home, someone with a lot of space under their bed may be needed.

In February, Kylie Jenner posted on Twitter that she doesn’t “open Snapchat anymore”. Now, I have no idea who Kylie Jenner is obviously. (If you’re curious, you’ll have to search Myspace or whatever the kids are using these days.) But this bland comment caught my attention because it seemed to have knocked $1bn off the valuation of the app’s parent company Snap.

Just to be clear, there’s no way of knowing for sure whether or not it was the Jenner tweet that tanked Snap’s valuation. There is a close correlation but it could, of course, have been something else. Perhaps a gif of a kitten deleting the app went viral the same day. But let’s assume for the sake of argument that it was the Jenner tweet.

The saga reveals the intriguing lack of inherent value of businesses such as Snap. If someone – even a social-media “influencer”, heaven forfend – said that they no longer drove a BMW, it might damage the brand’s equity but it would take nothing away from what makes the cars valuable: design and reliability.

Snapchat, by comparison, has little value aside from celebrity endorsements and hype. Like Bing Bong, the imaginary friend of Riley in Pixar’s Inside Out, if we stop believing in it, it simply fades into nothingness. And clearly these days, belief is a fickle commodity indeed.