Parenting & Family Quote by Frank Rich

There’s a quiet tenderness in the way Frank Rich frames ambition as a kind of migration story. “The kids who turn up” isn’t glamorous language; it’s almost observational, like a critic watching a familiar ritual repeat itself. Rich is pointing to a generational pattern: young people arriving in the cultural capitals with a bag full of hopes and a head full of scripts, chasing the industries that still concentrate power in a few zip codes.

The list structure matters. New York and LA are the obvious poles, but “and places in between. Chicago.” lands like a corrective. It widens the map while still acknowledging the hierarchy. Even in that quick detour, Rich is registering how the American arts economy both centralizes and mythologizes opportunity: you can “turn up” anywhere, but the story we tell ourselves about being discovered still gravitates toward a small set of cities.

His repetition of “Wanting to…” does double duty. On the surface it’s sympathetic, a simple description of creative desire. Underneath, it’s a subtle critique of how wanting is institutionalized: theater, indie film, television, radio read less like pure art forms than like gates, lanes, career tracks. “Break into” is the tell. It implies an enclosure - an industry fortified by money, connections, and luck - and a class of outsiders trying to breach it.

Rich, a journalist and longtime cultural critic, is also speaking from insider proximity. The tone suggests he’s seen both the promise and the churn: the hopeful arrivals, the invisible casualties, the way cities become engines that run on fresh desire.