I opened an Aldi Blind Box. Here’s what was inside

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Consumers who love surprises are in for a treat with Aldi’s Blind Box grocery bundles.

The boxes are filled with fan-favorite products and “fresh picks from across every aisle,” the grocery chain said in a June 15 news release, and shoppers have a chance to get them for free.

A new Aldi Blind Box will be released every day from June 22 to 25. At noon ET each day, customers can visit AldiBlindBox.com to claim that day’s themed box while supplies last. The boxes will be given away on a first-come, first-served basis, the company said in a news release, adding that more than 100 boxes will be given away per drop.

Social media users can visit Aldi’s Instagram page to see which theme drops next. The four themes for the boxes include:

Snack Blind Box: Features premium cheeses, dips, crunchy bites and sweets.
Fiber Blind Box: Features produce favorites and better-for-you picks.
Protein Blind Box: Features satisfying staples and surprising finds.
Mystery Blind Box: Features a surprise assortment of ALDI fan favorites and staples.

“The ALDI Blind Box taps into the excitement our fans already feel walking our aisles,” said Bridget Kozlowski, director of communications for Aldi, in a news release. “Our shoppers come to ALDI for value, but they also come for discovery. From viral ALDI Finds to tried-and-true products shoppers love to tell their friends about, people love the thrill of discovering something new here.”

Watch me open the Snack Blind Box Aldi sent me in the video at the top of this story.

What is in the Aldi Blind Box?

Here is a full list of the 15 items that were included in the box I opened:

Dubai-style pistachio spread
Cookie thins
Hot Honey BBQ or Hot Chili Lime chips
Pretzel slims
Cranberry white cheddar cheese
Goat cheese logs
Organic mini cucumbers
Organic strawberries
Hummus
Feta dip
Hot honey pepperoni or burnt ends dip
Italian dried cured meat
Sourdough pita crackers
Coconut clusters
Organic tortilla chips

“With surprise unboxings more popular than ever, this is our way of helping customers discover even more favorites,” Kozlowski said in the news release.

Gabe Hauari is a national trending news reporter at USA TODAY. You can follow him on X @GabeHauari or email him at [email protected].

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Dates, draws, prize money and everything else to know

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The WTA Tour Driven by Mercedes-Benz’s Grass-Court Swing will continue with the Bad Homburg Open. Alongside the WTA 250 Eastbourne Open, the WTA 500 event is the tune-up tournament for Wimbledon.

Previously a WTA 250 event, Bad Homburg will host its third tournament at the 500 level, and features a star-studded lineup including three Grand Slam champions.

From dates, draws, prize money and more, here’s everything you need to know about Bad Homburg.

What are the dates for each round?

Main-draw play for both the singles and doubles draws begins on Sunday, June 21, and singles qualifying will take place on Saturday, June 20.

The finals will take place on Saturday, June 27, beginning with the doubles championship at 11 a.m. local time (10 a.m. BST, 5 a.m. EST). The singles final will follow, not before 1:30 p.m. local time.

Singles

First round: June 21-22
Second round: June 23-24
Quarterfinals: June 25
Semifinals: June 26
Final: June 27

Doubles

First round: June 21-23
Quarterfinals: June 24-25
Semifinals: June 26
Final: June 27

How big is the draw, and who are the top players in the field?

There will be a 28-player singles draw and a 16-team doubles draw in Bad Homburg.

The singles draw will feature 19 direct entries, four wild cards, four qualifiers and one special exemption. The top four players will have a bye. Four top 10 players headline the field, and all direct entrants are currently ranked in the top 30 of the PIF WTA Rankings.

Top 10 players: (3) Iga Swiatek, (5) Mirra Andreeva, (8) Elina Svitolina, (10) Karolina Muchova

Swiatek, who made the final here last year, and Andreeva are set to begin their grass seasons at the event, while Svitolina will attempt to get through to the quarterfinals for the first time in three tries.

Defending champion Jessica Pegula is not scheduled to compete at this year’s tournament.

Linda Noskova, Naomi Osaka, 2024 champion Diana Shnaider, Iva Jovic and Ekaterina Alexandrova are among the top 20 players in the fold.

To see the full Bad Homburg player list, click here.

Wild cards: Alexandra Eala, Eva Lys, Venus Williams and Zheng Qinwen

Williams will play her first match since Madrid, and following Bad Homburg she will partner with Serena Williams in the Wimbledon doubles draw.

Withdrawals: Elena Rybakina, Sorana Cirstea (knee), Hailey Baptiste (knee), Cristina Bucsa (wrist)

Moved into main draw: Wang Xinyu

Wang moved into the draw Tuesday after Bucsa pulled out. (Bucsa had moved in following Cirstea’s withdrawal.)

Who are the defending champions?

After an early exit in Berlin the week prior, then-No. 3 Pegula bounced back in Bad Homburg, defeating Swiatek 6-4, 7-5 for her second career grass-court title. The win gave Pegula a title on every surface in 2025, after Pegula won in Austin and Charleston earlier in the season.

Pegula needed three sets to win her quarterfinal and semifinal matches against Emma Navarro and Noskova, respectively, but handled the final with more ease, winning in 1 hour and 46 minutes. She only faced one break point in the match.

In doubles, Guo Hanyu and Alexandra Panova won the second WTA 500 title of their respective careers with a 4-6, 7-6 (4), [10-5] comeback against No. 2 seeds Lyudmyla Kichenok and Ellen Perez. Their first title had come in Adelaide in January of that year.

What are the prize money and ranking points at stake?

The tournament will have a collective prize pool of approximately €1.049 million ($1.21 million USD), similar to Berlin. As with all WTA 500 events, a maximum of 500 ranking points are available depending on how far a player or team advances in the tournament.

Here’s a full breakdown of the prize money, in euros, and ranking points available in the singles draw.

The doubles champions will receive €53,510 and 500 ranking points, with the finalists earning €32,520 and 325 points.

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«Ríos está sempre na linha da frente»

«Ríos está sempre na linha da frente» | A Bola

Shukorov e Ríos, no jogo entre Uzbequistão e Colômbia, na Cidade do México, da primeira jornada do Mundial — Foto: IMAGO

Selecionador da Colômbia, Néstor Lorenzo, elogia «atitude fantástica» do médio do Benfica

A iniciar sessão com Google…

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Wendell Pierce is working as hard as ever in TV, film and theater : NPR

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Wendell Pierce stars in Othello at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C.

Teresa Castracane

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Teresa Castracane

Wendell Pierce says there’s a joke actors have about the five stages of their careers:

“There’s ‘Who is Wendell Pierce?’ ‘Get me Wendell Pierce.’ ‘Get me someone like Wendell Pierce.’ ‘Get me a younger Wendell Pierce.’ And then the last and final and fifth stage is: ‘Who is Wendell Pierce?'” he says.

After starring roles on The Wire and Treme, and a 2023 Tony Award nomination as the first Black actor to play Willy Loman in the Broadway revival of Death of a Salesman, Pierce is working as hard as ever. He says he’s motivated by the “ticking clock of mortality” — but also by the desire to challenge himself as an actor.

Though many entertainers shy away from the label “journeyman actor,” Pierce proudly embraces the term: “It’s not just to go from job to job, but [to] be intentional about the jobs I take,” he says. “I try to do the trifecta, as I call it — television and film and theater — every year.”

Wendell Pierce On Parenting, The Pandemic And Reckoning With The Past

Pierce currently plays a captain on CBS’ Elsbeth and a CIA officer in the film Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War. He’s also starring in the Shakespeare Theatre Company production of Othello in Washington, D.C.

Pierce likens tackling Shakespeare to detective work. First, he says, there’s the “mining the text for all of its understanding and everything that Shakespeare is telling you not only about the characters, but how to portray them and what’s happening.”

More than that, though, there’s also the emotional aspect of connecting with the character — and the physical and vocal strength required of a three-hour production. “The challenge is physical, it’s intellectual, and it’s emotional, and that’s the great thing about doing Shakespeare, and even specifically doing Othello,” Pierce says. “I always think of these … iconic roles and large roles like the beginning of a hike up Mount Everest.”

Interview highlights

On how many years ago, jazz helped him crack the code on Shakespeare

Wendell Pierce: Everyone's Favorite Fake Trombone Player

I went to the club to hear Arthur Blythe, a great alto saxophonist. And he’s pretty avant-garde, but he had this really hip, swinging tune. I was humming along with it. And then he went into his solo, which was free and wild and all over the place. And I was just looking around the club, still humming the song in my head. And when he finished his solo, we were right exactly on the same note in the melody of the song.

And that’s when I had this epiphany that while he was free and wild and doing his solo, he was aware of the structure of the song, and knew exactly where he was at all times, and came back to it. So he was free within the form, and then I understood that’s what Shakespeare is like: To have freedom within the form, don’t allow the verse to constrict you, but let it be the guard rails of where you’re supposed to be. But you have the opportunity to take it wherever you would like to take it. That’s really what all great art is about, a merger of technical proficiency and expression, and unlimited expression, but being able to be technically proficient and exact. And that opened up Shakespeare to me, that night, in September, 1981, in New York, listening to jazz at the Village Vanguard.

On why he almost quit The Wire

During the course of The Wire, people would challenge us all the time — “You are only demonstrating the thuggery and the crime and you’re perpetuating this idea that, the stereotype that Black folks are criminally inclined and violent and all.”

I remember a woman on the train challenging me, African American woman who worked on Wall Street. And I said, “I accept your criticism. … I welcome the challenge and the criticism so I can make sure that we don’t fall victim to that criticism. … But we have judges, the mayor, the president of the city council, the city council members, police officers, lawyers, doctors, teachers, who are all African American. But you’re only seeing the criminals. Imagine how tough it is for a little kid in those neighborhoods. They don’t see the lawyers or the doctors. If you don’t see them as an educated woman, a professional, and you can only see the thuggery, imagine how susceptible those young kids are to it. And that’s what we’re trying to tell and the story we’re trying to tell.”

Now, in the fourth season, I almost quit because at our wrap party a young lady comes up to me. She says, “Mr. Pierce, I was on the show this year. I really wanted to work with you. We didn’t have anything together. I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoy your work and all.” And I said, “Who did you play?” And she says, “I look younger than I am, so I was one of the kids in the middle school.” … She played this out of control young woman who slashes another girl’s face. … She was like, “I’m going to Brown University on full scholarship.”

And I thought to myself, why are we not telling your story? … And I thought about the criticism and I said, that woman was right. And I said, I should leave the show because we’re perpetuating a stereotype. And then the episode came on for the fourth season and it was so impactful. And we see exactly where we lose our kids. And we see that inflection point where we can save them and put them on the right track. And where we make them the young woman who goes to Brown on a full scholarship, and where we lose them and send them into that pipeline, into the penal system, and calling our dysfunction out in our society that creates the criminality, that doesn’t celebrate the education of this young woman going to school and all. So it wasn’t arbitrary, and then that’s the only thing that made me come back.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, left, and Wendell Pierce participate in a panel discussion during a Federal Interagency Drug Endangered Children (DEC) Task Force event at the Justice Department May 31, 2011 in Washington, D.C. The event was organized to announce a public awareness campaign, addressing the challenges faced by children and families affected by drug abuse.

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On taking care of his late father in his last 10 years

He was two months away from his 99th birthday. He passed in my hands, we were holding hands. I was there with him. I had my father for a long time. I got closer to my father in the last 10 years of his life than I ever had before. My mother passed, and one of her dying wishes was, “Wendell, take care of your father.” She knew. While I was working in Budapest, if I got four days off, I would go home to New Orleans, and spend time with him. It was a blessing. I was traveling the world and being an actor and at the same time my home base is New Orleans, and here I would have my father with me for all those years and he was fuel to my fire. He was reminding me of everything that he taught me and as I attack these challenges of these great roles and the different roles that I play, he is very much in my process.

This is a man who fought in [the Battle of] Saipan in World War II, fought for the country that he loved when this country wasn’t loving him back and came back and his voting rights weren’t even protected and here he was risking his life in The Double V campaign in the Black community — victory abroad and victory at home. So he very much believed in that.

On the erasure of Black history

The idea of trying to eliminate any sort of contributions that the African-American community has made to this country in the year that we try to celebrate 250 — it is so insulting. … It feels like a visceral attack.

My brother was purged out of his job here in Washington, D.C. I know so many people and so many Black women in particular, this attack on minorities and women in a world where people are trying to erase them, we realize that that is our call to duty of our generation. We know now that we have to mark our passing on the tree and declare who we are, who we were, what our accomplishments are and have been and what we have created. And exercise our right of self-determination and declaration of accomplishment. We owe that to our ancestors, we owe that to the generations yet to come because there are those who do not have our best interest at heart.

Ann Marie Baldonado and Nico Gonzalez Wisler produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.

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