Opinion: The Letters Top Five

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Everyone must have been busy digesting their turkey: last week The TImes’ Letters to the editor received just 508 usable letters, 214 of which were in our Top Five Topics.

• Terror in Mumbai: 94 letters;
• Thanksgiving miscellany, including responses to this story about vegans and this editorial detailing what we are thankful for: 47 letters;
• Obama’s cabinet: 25 letters;
• Neal Gabler’s Op-Ed about Joe McCarthy’s lasting influence on today’s Republican party: 24 letters; and
• President Bush, including this Rosa Brooks column and this editorial about presidential pardons: 24 letters.

For those keeping track, Proposition 8, which has helmed the Top Five for a month, came in sixth this week, with 21 letters.

How the Top Five is tabulated: Each week, your letters maven receives thousands of e-mails, dozens of letters through the good old U.S. postal service, and even a few faxes here and there.

After she cuts out spam, obscene mail, letters addressed to more than one recipient, letters that seem to be the fruit of letter-writing campaigns--more on that later--and letters with attachments (which gum up our computer systems), she is usually left with several hundred eligible items, represented in the Letters Top Five tally. From these, she selects the somewhere around 100 that get published in the newspaper.