Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Atlantic was founded in 1857 in Boston, Massachusetts, as The Atlantic Monthly. The idea originated at a dinner party hosted by publisher Moses Dresser Phillips at the Parker House Hotel in the autumn of that year, and the first issue appeared in November 1857.
The Atlantic's founders included publisher Moses Dresser Phillips and literary figures Francis H. Underwood, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Greenleaf Whittier, and W. E. B. Du Bois. James Russell Lowell served as the first editor.
Laurene Powell Jobs, through her Emerson Collective organization, acquired majority ownership of The Atlantic on the 28th of July, 2017. David G. Bradley and Atlantic Media retained a minority share. As of 2024, the CEO is Nicholas Thompson and the editor-in-chief is Jeffrey Goldberg.
The Atlantic has made three presidential endorsements in its history: Abraham Lincoln in 1860, Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, and Hillary Clinton in 2016. It also endorsed Joe Biden in 2020 and Kamala Harris in 2024, and was a prominent critic of Donald Trump's presidency.
Among the most historically significant pieces is Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think," published in July 1945, which inspired Douglas Engelbart and Ted Nelson to develop the modern workstation and hypertext technology. The magazine also published Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" in its August 1963 edition.
By 2024, The Atlantic had crossed one million subscribers and become profitable. This followed a period in which the magazine lost $20 million in a single year and laid off 17% of its staff.