The Atlantic
The Atlantic is an American magazine and multi-platform publisher based in Washington, D.C. It features articles on politics, foreign affairs, business and the economy, culture and the arts, technology, and science.
It was founded in 1857 in Boston as The Atlantic Monthly, a literary and cultural magazine that published leading writers' commentary on education, the abolition of slavery, and other major political issues of that time. Its founders included Francis H. Underwood and prominent writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Greenleaf Whittier. James Russell Lowell was its first editor. During the 19th and 20th centuries, the magazine also published the annual The Atlantic Monthly Almanac. The magazine was purchased in 1999 by businessman David G. Bradley, who fashioned it into a general editorial magazine primarily aimed at serious national readers and "thought leaders"; in 2017, he sold a majority interest in the publication to Laurene Powell Jobs's Emerson Collective.
The magazine was published monthly until 2001, when 11 issues were produced; since 2003, it has published 10 per year. It dropped "Monthly" from the cover with the January/February 2004 issue, and officially changed the name in 2007. In 2024, it announced that it will resume publishing monthly issues in 2025. In 2016, the periodical was named Magazine of the Year by the American Society of Magazine Editors. In 2022, its writers won Pulitzer Prizes for feature writing and, in 2022, 2023, and 2024 The Atlantic won the award for general excellence by the American Society of Magazine Editors. In 2024, it was reported that the magazine had crossed one million subscribers and become profitable, three years after losing $20 million in a single year and laying off 17% of its staff.
As of 2024, the website's executive editor is Adrienne LaFrance, the editor-in-chief is Jeffrey Goldberg, and the CEO is Nicholas Thompson. According to a 2025 Pew Research Center study on educational differences among audiences of 30 major U.S. news outlets, The Atlantic had the highest proportion of college-educated readers, with 62% of its audience holding at least a bachelor's degree.
Founding
19th century
In the autumn of 1857, Moses Dresser Phillips, a publisher from Boston, created The Atlantic Monthly. The plan for the magazine was launched at a dinner party at the Parker House Hotel in Boston, which was described in a letter by Phillips:At that dinner he announced his idea for the magazine:
Harriet Beecher Stowe was invited to the dinner party but declined because it served alcohol. She signed the manifesto that set out the goals of the paper along with Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and The Atlantic today credits her as one of its founders.
The Atlantics first issue was published in November 1857, and quickly gained notability as one of the finest magazines in the English-speaking world.
In 1878, the magazine absorbed The Galaxy, a competitor monthly magazine founded a dozen years previously by William Conant Church and his brother Francis P. Church; it had published works by Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Ion Hanford Perdicaris and Henry James.
In 1879, The Atlantic had offices in Winthrop Square in Boston and at 21 Astor Place in New York City.
Literary history
A leading literary magazine, The Atlantic has published many significant works and authors. It was the first to publish pieces by the abolitionists Julia Ward Howe, and William Parker, whose slave narrative, "The Freedman's Story" was published in February and March 1866. It also published Charles W. Eliot's "The New Education", a call for practical reform that led to his appointment to the presidency of Harvard University in 1869, works by Charles Chesnutt before he collected them in The Conjure Woman, and poetry and short stories, and helped launch many national literary careers. In 2005, the magazine won a National Magazine Award for fiction.Editors have recognized major cultural changes and movements. For example, of the emerging writers of the 1920s, Ernest Hemingway had his short story "Fifty Grand" published in the July 1927 edition. Harking back to its abolitionist roots, in its August 1963 edition, at the height of the civil rights movement, the magazine published Martin Luther King Jr.'s defense of civil disobedience, "Letter from Birmingham Jail", under the headline "The Negro Is Your Brother".
The magazine has published speculative articles that inspired the development of new technologies. The classic example is Vannevar Bush's essay "As We May Think", which inspired Douglas Engelbart and later Ted Nelson to develop the modern workstation and hypertext technology.
The Atlantic Monthly founded the Atlantic Monthly Press in 1917; for many years, it was operated in partnership with Little, Brown and Company. Its published books included Drums Along the Mohawk and Blue Highways. The press was sold in 1986; today it is an imprint of Grove Atlantic.
In addition to publishing notable fiction and poetry, The Atlantic has emerged in the 21st century as an influential platform for longform storytelling and newsmaker interviews. Influential cover stories have included Anne Marie Slaughter's "Why Women Still Can't Have It All" and Ta-Nehisi Coates's "A Case for Reparations". In 2015, Jeffrey Goldberg's "Obama Doctrine" was widely discussed by American media and prompted response by many world leaders.
As of 2022, writers and frequent contributors to the print magazine included James Fallows, Jeffrey Goldberg, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Caitlin Flanagan, Jonathan Rauch, McKay Coppins, Gillian White, Adrienne LaFrance, Vann R. Newkirk II, Derek Thompson, David Frum, Jennifer Senior, George Packer, Ed Yong, and James Parker.
On August 2, 2023, it was announced that Jeffrey Goldberg, who had served as editor-in-chief of The Atlantic since 2016, had been named as the tenth moderator of the PBS news program, Washington Week, and that the politics and culture publication would also enter into an editorial partnership with the television program – which was retitled accordingly as Washington Week with The Atlantic – similar to the earlier collaboration with the National Journal. The first episode under the longer title, and with Goldberg as moderator, was the one broadcast on August 11, 2023.
Political viewpoint
In 1860, three years into publication, The Atlantics then-editor James Russell Lowell endorsed Republican Abraham Lincoln for his first run for president and also endorsed the abolition of slavery.In 1964, Edward Weeks wrote on behalf of the editorial board in endorsing Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson and rebuking Republican Barry Goldwater's candidacy.
In 2016, during the 2016 presidential campaign, the editorial board endorsed a candidate for the third time in the magazine's history, urging readers to support Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in a rebuke of Republican Donald Trump's candidacy.
After Trump prevailed in the November 2016 election, the magazine became a strong critic of his. In March 2019, a cover article by editor Yoni Appelbaum called for the impeachment of Donald Trump: "It's time for Congress to judge the president's fitness to serve."
In September 2020, it published a story, citing several anonymous sources, reporting that Trump referred to dead American soldiers as "losers". Trump called it a "fake story", and suggested the magazine would soon be out of business.
In 2020, The Atlantic endorsed the Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, and urged its readers to oppose Trump's re-election bid. In early 2024, The Atlantic published a special 24-article issue titled "If Trump Wins," warning about a potential second term for Trump being worse than his first. In October, the publication endorsed Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in her presidential bid against Trump in the 2024 election.
Format
''Atlantic'' website access
The website is, as of 2025 a four tier freemium model. All paid subscribers get access to unlimited articles including the archives and narrated articles and various other features. The base paid model is "Digital" subscriber, the higher tier "Print & Digital" includes physical copies of the magazine, and the "Premium" subscription includes advertisement free access.The Atlantic went on-line with AOL in 1993. They created an independent website The Atlantic Monthly on the Web in 1995, becoming "Atlantic Unbound" in 1997.
The Atlantic had a paywall, being only available to subscribers to the print edition, until January 2008, when they removed it, concomitant with a sponsorship from Goldman Sachs.
The website introduced "soft" limitations in October 2016, when free readers with adblockers were advised that they could turn off their adblocker, pay or be blocked. Closing the warning window, however would allow reading the article, the block wasn't actually "hard" implemented until 10 April 2017.
A new paywall was expected to start trials in January 2018, but the project was delayed while platform improvements and staff recruitment were completed. The relaunch of the paywall was finally announced in August 2019.
In September 2019 the new paywall was imposed, "Digital" subscriptions were $49.99 per year, print and digital $59.99 and "Premium" $100. Free users are no longer permitted five articles per month. They can only read the first two paragraphs or so and are then presented a link to subscribe.
Aspen Ideas Festival
In 2005, The Atlantic and the Aspen Institute launched the Aspen Ideas Festival, a ten-day event in and around the city of Aspen, Colorado. The annual conference features 350 presenters, 200 sessions, and 3,000 attendees. The event has been called a "political who's who" as it often features policymakers, journalists, lobbyists, and think tank leaders.On January 22, 2008, TheAtlantic.com dropped its subscriber wall and allowed users to freely browse its site, including all past archives. By 2011 The Atlantics web properties included TheAtlanticWire.com, a news- and opinion-tracking site launched in 2009, and TheAtlanticCities.com, a stand-alone website started in 2011 that was devoted to global cities and trends. According to a Mashable profile in December 2011, "traffic to the three web properties recently surpassed 11 million uniques per month, up a staggering 2500% since The Atlantic brought down its paywall in early 2008."