Grid school

CROSS PURPOSES Kahn is boxed in at his UWS home office.

Photograph: Aaron M. Cohen

David J. Kahn doesn’t hate Sunday brunch—the meal is just a casualty of his handiwork. As a frequent contributor to The New York Times crossword puzzle, Kahn accepts responsibility for congealed eggs Benedict, lukewarm lattes and half-eaten hash browns. But now he’s ready to make amends—and maybe help you get back to breakfast faster.

On Thursday 1, Kahn, 65, is hosting a crossword-puzzle master class at the 92nd Street Y, where he’ll be teaching tricks and shortcuts to becoming a better solver. (Quick tip: In Times puzzles, individual squares can sometimes contain symbols or short words.) He’s even fashioned a special puzzle for the occasion—“Y, of Course!”—with clues relating to the institution’s 133-year history. “The class is for everyone from beginner to advanced,” Kahn stresses. “You don’t need a massive vocabulary to be good. The most important skill is persistence.”

Once upon a time, though, solvers did need knowledge of esoteric topics to complete a grid. That was standard practice after crosswords debuted in the New York World in 1913 and quickly became a national craze. Ironically, it was the characteristically elitist Times (which didn’t publish its first crossword until 1942) that sparked a shift towards egalitarianism in 1993, by hiring Will Shortz as its crossword editor. “For a long time, the answers were these arcane terms like proa, a Malaysian canoe,” says Kahn. “Will wanted words that were used in everyday conversation, to have the puzzles be more accessible. Crosswords are made to be solved—even the hard ones.”

Raised in New York, Kahn was indoctrinated into the world of crosswords at age 11 by his Uncle Al. By the time puberty hit, Kahn was racing out to the newsstand on Saturday nights to grab a copy of the next day’s Times. “The Sunday puzzle was the highlight of the week for me,” he says, adding somewhat sheepishly, “I guess you can tell I didn’t have many dates on Saturday.”

A puzzle Kahn created for the subscription-based Crosswords Club in the early 1990s transformed him into a card-carrying cruciverbalist (as constructors are formally known). And though he still works as a consulting actuary, he averages 45 bylines a year for the Times and regularly designs puzzles for The New York Sun, The Washington Post and the L.A. Times.

A typical grid can take Kahn 10 to 15 hours to create, and he finds inspiration in everything from books and billboards to talking heads. When Tom Brokaw punned that “Manhattanites define a hard drive as ‘a difficult commute,’ ” Kahn went to work on “Technophobe’s Delight,” which eventually became his—and then President Bill Clinton’s— favorite puzzle. Another fan knit Kahn a wall hanging based on one of his more challenging grids. But, Kahn admits, the feedback isn’t always favorable. “I get approached at parties sometimes. Someone will really get into it and start debating the definitions I’ve used.” That aggravation is precisely why this old-fashioned wordsmith needn’t worry about job security in an increasingly high-tech world. “Even if they’re frustrating, crosswords entertain,” says Kahn. “As long as they do that, they’ll never go out of style.”

The popularity of crosswords may actually be on the rise. The success of the 2006 documentary Wordplay drew mainstream attention to the already popular American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (David J. Kahn appears at the 92nd Street Y Thu 1 at 7pm.