These Hearst magazines tell you all about the $195K Mercedes

Labor Day has driven on by — and that means car dealerships around the country are chock-full of models to💎 test-drive, haggle over, or maybe just dream about. On the💙 newsstand this week, Car and Driver and Road & Track, two Hearst titles, take the $195,000 Mercedes AMG-GT out for a spin.

Road & Track is written for the gentleman driver. Sam Smith and Jack Baruth, both exce🌃llent and evocative journalistsꦇ, seem to be trying to outdo each other in this month’s issue.

Baruth’s cover story pits the Benz against a Porsche 911 Carrera Cabriolet on a road in the Swiss Alps that has so many twists and coiꦚls it resembles a small intestine. He sticks to the thrill of the drive, recounts how he almost collided with a tourist bus, and doesn’t get bogged down by trivia or technical details. In the end, the Benz is a “deep-chested attention grabber that does nothing by half-measures,” outdoing the Porsche.

Elsewhere, Smith mounts a deliciously florid defense of stock car racing, which, though it doesn’t quite reach the zaniness of Tom Wolfe’s “Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Str꧑eamline Baby,” has moments of stream-of-consciousness abandon that are woefully lacking in American magazines these day🐎s.

“In that moment,” Smith writes of his comm🦂union with a car, “it almost hurts, loving this country — her capacity for the simultaneously great and ridiculous — so much.”

Where R&T gets wistful over the grain of the leather on the steering wheel, Car and Driver is content to tinker with the carburetor. T💞hat’s an understandable goal — and maybe even a laudable one for some gearheads — but to us it mostly makes for boring reading.

The editors rev up 19 cars, including the Benz AMG-GT, for its “Lightning Lap,” a 4.1-mile track on the Virginia International Raceway. The result, unfortunately, is like a collection of Amazon reviews about some of the fastest and most thrilling machines you could ♑ever hope to drive. The AMG-GT wins by a few seconds, but by the time you’ve read about how the 18 other cars handled the loop, it’s hard to get excited about it. When C🌌&D tries to get lyrical it can veer into corny.

(“The best laps usually happeℱn in the early morning, when the air is cooler than Miles Davis” was ꦏa notable groaner.)

One pleasur💛ably geeky interlude comes early in the issue, when it explains the physics of those flailing wind-tube guys that🌄 are propped up outside used-car dealerships.

‘Happened’ stances

Hillary Clinton just released her 𝓡memoir, which, of course, has everybody giving 💛their own take on “what really happened” in her botched presidential bid.

The New Yorker’s David Remnick, , is considerate enough to distribute blame for her loss, taking aim at Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s “despicable act” (Clinton’s phrase) in threatening the White House if President Obama revealed what he knew about the🍒 Russians’ interference in the election. His interview also gives Clinton a platform to attack President Trump, who, she says, is a “clear and present danger to our democracy” and is unaware of how he is “being played by the Putins and the Kim Jong-uns of the world.”

🌜But Remnick also tracks down a few former members of Clinton’s inner circle who were steamed at her for, in the words of one, “blowing the biggest slam dun🦩k in history,” and for profiting on a book about the “disaster.”

While Clinton rues former FBI Director James Comey’s 11th-hour announcement on her e-mails, Remnickꦫ laments her inability to “find a language” that could convince enough struggling working Americans that she, and not a “cartoonish plutocrat,” was their champion.

New York’s Rebecca Traister, meanwhile, is a bit more sympathetic to Clinton, whose furious reaction to her angeജr, she says, confirms her thesis that Americans hate women who rage.

Traister praises the former secretary of state for her unvarnished — albeit belated — honesty. The book is “100 percent more candid than anything she has previously expressed during her 25 years in n♎ational politics,” Traister writes. She also notes that Clinton is incensed at the New York Times’ continued “infatuation” with her e-🌠mail story.

Elsewhere, Time’s cover story on how Irma’s destruction “coul♋d have been worse” because the “Sunshine state didn’t break; its cities didn’t tumble,” smacks of glorified weather reporting. The 10-page report offers a glowing — and somewhat sleep-inducing — review of the government’s response to the deadly storm, as if the US has this hurricane problem all solved. Of course, the fact that the magazine’s longtime Managing Editor Nancy Gibbs got swept out of her job last week probably didn’t help, either.