Arts and culture

Balinese wood carving

Balinese wood carving, known as ukir kayu, is the traditional craft of carving wood in Bali, Indonesia, centered on the village of Mas near Ubud since the 1930s.

Bálint Balassi (1554–1594) was a Hungarian nobleman, soldier, and poet, considered the first great classic of Hungarian-language poetry, known for love and religious verse and the nine-line Balassi stanza.

Balkan cuisine

Balkan cuisine: the shared food tradition of the Balkan Peninsula (ajvar, sarma, baklava, burek), shaped by Byzantine, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian influences, distinct from Mediterranean and Slavic cuisines.

Balkrishna

Acharya Balkrishna (आचार्य बालकृष्ण), born 1972, is an India-based Ayurveda scholar and businessman who co-founded Patanjali Ayurved with Swami Ramdev, leads it as managing director, chairs Patanjali Foods, and heads Patanjali Yogpeeth Trust and University of Patanjali.

Ball Boy Tactics (볼보이 택틱스)

Ball Boy Tactics (볼보이 택틱스) is a 2025 Korean BL drama, 8 episodes on Heavenly, adapted from Ji Seung-hyun's web novel, starring Choi Jae-hyeok and Yeom Min-hyeok as a basketball star and retired gymnast in a campus romance.

Ball in the Family

Ball in the Family, American reality series premiering August 29, 2017 on Facebook Watch, following LaVar, Tina, Lonzo, LiAngelo, and LaMelo Ball; Bunim/Murray-produced, 24 million premiere viewers, episodes lengthened after viewer comments.

Ball Lightning (球状闪电_(电视剧))

Ball Lightning (球状闪电) is an upcoming 30-episode iQIYI Chinese sci-fi web drama adapted from Liu Cixin's 2004 novel, directed by Dai Mo, supervised by Chen Sicheng, starring Tong Yao and Wang Anyu; filmed 2022, licensed 2025, trailer 2026, air date pending.

Ball of Fire

Ball of Fire is a 1941 screwball comedy directed by Howard Hawks, produced by Samuel Goldwyn, starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck, written by Brackett and Wilder from the story "From A to Z", a Snow White-style tale of professors and slang, with four Oscar nominations.

Ballad

Ballad: a narrative folk song or poem in ABCB quatrains with alternating 4-3-4-3 stresses, orally transmitted; distinct from the French fixed-form ballade and from the modern slow love song.

Ballad in Russian poetry

The ballad (баллада) in Russian poetry is a lyric-epic verse genre of mysterious, dramatic plots set at liminal places, established as a literary genre by Vasily Zhukovsky in 1808.

Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl

ballad of a homeschooled girl is an Olivia Rodrigo song, track 5 on her 2023 album GUTS, written with Dan Nigro. A pop-punk track about social anxiety, it reflects her homeschooled child-actor upbringing and was nominated for the 2024 Grammy for Best Rock Song.

Ballad of a Small Player

Ballad of a Small Player is a 2025 Edward Berger psychological thriller for Netflix, adapted from Lawrence Osborne's 2014 novel, starring Colin Farrell as fugitive gambler Lord Doyle in Macau, with Fala Chen and Tilda Swinton; released theatrically October 15 and streaming October 29, 2025.

Ballad of a Soldier (Баллада о солдате)

Ballad of a Soldier (Баллада о солдате) is Grigori Chukhrai's 1959 Mosfilm drama about soldier Alyosha Skvortsov's six-day leave home across wartime Russia; Cannes special prize 1960, Lenin Prize 1961, Oscar-nominated screenplay.

Ballad of Beautiful Women

Ballad of Beautiful Women (Lì Rén Xíng, 丽人行) is a satirical narrative poem by the Tang dynasty poet Du Fu, written in 753 about the Yang family's extravagance.

Ballad of Mulan

The Ballad of Mulan (木蘭辭) is an anonymous Chinese folk ballad of the Northern Dynasties about a woman who serves in the army in her father's place.

Ballad of the Army Carts

Ballad of the Army Carts (Bing che xing, 兵車行) is a narrative poem by the Tang dynasty poet Du Fu, written around 751, protesting conscription for frontier wars.

Ballad of the East Gate

Ballad of the East Gate (Dongmen xing, 东门行) is an anonymous Han-dynasty yuefu ballad about a poor man who resolves on a desperate course despite his wife's pleas.

Ballad of the Two Grandfathers

Ballad of the Two Grandfathers (Balada de los dos abuelos) is a 1934 poem by Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén, spoken through the shadows of his black and white grandfathers.

Ballad of the West Gate

Ballad of the West Gate (西门行, "West Gate Ballad") is an anonymous Han dynasty yuefu ballad, a classic example of Chinese carpe diem poetry about life's brevity.

Ballad of the White Horse

The Ballad of the White Horse (白马篇) is a 28-line poem by the Three Kingdoms poet Cao Zhi celebrating a young frontier knight-errant devoted to defending the state.

Ballad of Xizhou

The Ballad of Xizhou (Xizhou qu, 西洲曲) is an anonymous lyric folk song of the Southern Dynasties (420–589) yuefu tradition, the longest such lyric preserved, describing a woman's longing for her absent lover.

Ballad opera

Ballad opera is a genre of English musical theater combining spoken dialogue with songs set to popular tunes, begun by John Gay's The Beggar's Opera in 1728.

Ballad revival

The ballad revival was the renewed literary and scholarly enthusiasm for traditional ballads, begun with Percy's Reliques of 1765, inspiring Romantic writers and culminating in Child's standard ballad scholarship.

Ballad stanza

The ballad stanza, or ballad meter, is a four-line stanza with four stresses on lines 1 and 3 and three on lines 2 and 4, rhyming ABCB.

Ballade

The ballade is a fixed French poetic form of three strophes on the same rhymes with a refrain and envoi, codified by Guillaume de Machaut in the 14th century.

Ballade des dames du temps jadis

Ballade des dames du temps jadis is a 15th-century Middle French poem by François Villon asking what became of celebrated women, with the refrain "But where are the snows of yesteryear?"

Ballade des pendus

The Ballade des pendus is a Middle French poem by François Villon, written in the voice of corpses on a gibbet who ask the living for pity and prayers.

Ballads 1

Ballads 1 (BALLADS 1) is Joji's debut studio album, released 26 October 2018 on 88rising/12Tone; it debuted at number 3 on the Billboard 200, topped the R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, and is certified gold.

Ballads and Romances

Ballads and Romances, Polish Ballady i romanse, is a cycle of fourteen narrative poems by Adam Mickiewicz, published in Vilnius in 1822 and taken as the beginning of Polish Romanticism.