Checked the price of gas lately? Live outside Manhattan and you’ve probably noticed that it’s low and getting lower as the world’s fossil fuel supplies outstrip the increasingly efficient demand.

This is good news for the auto industry, and gives us a perfect chance to take a look at the auto magazines.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: all the mags reviewed here have the newest Ford Mustang GT on their cover. This isn’t a fluke. “It’s like a Kardashian wedding — everybody’s gotta cover it,” said Mike Floyd, Automobile’s editor in chief. Generally, Automobile was the most technical, with a heavy focus on driving specs and probably the least welcoming to people who know their subway schedules and aren’t sure what fuel injection is. A nicely photographed feature on Land Rovers off-roading through Colorado — and comparisons to previous excursions — brought out some people who are willing to pay $14,000 for a nine-day trek through mountains. Yikes.

Car and Driver had a funny, informative feature on the controversy over horseless carriages in Central Park. Those motor-propelled carriages cost nearly $500,000 a pop, while each horse-drawn one costs $7,500 from the Troyer Carriage Co. of Shipshewana, Ind. For some reason there are at least four references to the Apocalypse throughout the magazine, which was, well, strange (The aforementioned article’s headline? “Horses of Babylon.”)

Motortrend has its annual SUV of the Year award, which it gives to the Honda CR-V. This is almost a gutsy choice given the luxury competition. The Japanese car beat out Porsche and Mercedes-Benz for essentially being an all-around vehicle, both fun and economical, according to the editors.

Road & Track’s largest feature is for its 2015 performance car award, which it gives to the Porsche 911 GT3. Clocking in at 34 pages — not counting ads — the funny, readable, well-designed piece was about as entertaining as getting to test-drive a dozen or so sports cars probably is. Of the four magazines here, R&T is the only one to see its circulation actually go up for the first half of this year compared to the same period in 2013 — and it’s easy to see why.

We love the fact that the New Yorker’s tech issue has printed an article on drone strikes in Pakistan alongside an article on Spotify. In the former, Steve Coll quotes a tribal leader in North Waziristan saying fear and paranoia about drones has “turned the people into psychiatric patients.” With Spotify, it’s more about tech billionaires like Sean Parker fleecing artists like Rosanne Cash, who says she made $104 from 600,000 Spotify streams over the past 18 months. “I know [Spotify founder] Daniel Ek is going to do just fine,” says New York avant-garde guitarist Marc Ribot, whose band made $187 from 68,000 streams. “I don’t know that about the people in my band.”

New York has a cover story on emoji that is — like the collection of smiley faces, fruits, animals and lumps of poo gathered in your latest smartphone — sort of fun and sort of dumb. “Are words on the way out?” the editors ask, annoyingly. And yet nowhere in this seven-and-a-half page feature is anybody quoted expressing any significant reservation about words getting replaced with cute little images. Indeed, the conclusion is that these happy little characters are a good thing because they can “soften” our text dialogues, as they “have no in-built linguistic capacity for meanness.” As far as we can remember, this wasn’t among George Orwell’s key requirements for good communication.

Time puts Taylor Swift on its cover and declares her “America’s most important musician,” which may be depressing for those of us who grew up in the age of Bob Dylan. The article makes the case that Swift shouldn’t be lumped into the same artistic category as peers like Rihanna and Miley Cyrus, who are the faces of hit-manufacturing machines that rely heavily on outside song writers. “Seemingly everyone who works with Swift cites her uncommon determination and exacting nature,” reporter Jack Dickey writes. Nevertheless, Swift tapped for her latest album “1989” producer Max Martin, whose clients have included Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys and ’N Sync.