The New Yorker:

Despite securing an important court victory against the Administration, the Illinois businessman Rick Woldenberg knows that his battle with the White House is far from over.

By John Cassidy

From a boxy office and warehouse complex in Vernon Hills, Illinois, about twenty miles north of Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, Rick Woldenberg has a firsthand view of how global capitalism works—or how it worked until recently. The Princeton-educated sixty-five-year-old is from an entrepreneurial family. In the nineteen-sixties, his father founded a business to supply schools with products designed to aid learning, such as reading and math kits. In the nineteen-eighties, his mother founded a sister business, which initially supplied other firms in the same industry. Since then, the Woldenberg family’s companies, which are now called Learning Resources and hand2mind, have grown into a business that employs more than five hundred people and sells everything from letter blocks to building kits, along with Cooper, a coding robot.

Woldenberg joined Learning Resources in 1990 and became its chief executive eight years later. Since 2019, he has also been running hand2mind. The companies’ products are designed in Vernon Hills and Torrance, California, where they have another office, but virtually all of the items are manufactured in Asia, principally in China. Some of them enter through O’Hare, but most are shipped to ports on the West Coast, and then delivered by rail to the Illinois warehouse or sent to customers. These days, distributors include Scholastic, Walmart, and Amazon.

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