Opinion: The Letters Top Five

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Tea, anyone? During the week ending April 18, The Times received 669 usable letters, 322 of which were in our Top Five Topics. More than 100 focused on last Wednesday’s Tea Party protests.

• Tea Parties: 102 letters, reacting to Times coverage of the April 15 rallies, including this Op-Ed by Marc Cooper;
• Front page ad: 89 letters, most excoriating our newspaper for running a large advertisement for a new show on NBC on the front page. Also included here are a few letters about a Times ad for ‘The Soloist,’ based on the friendship between Times columnist Steve Lopez and musician Nathaniel Ayers;
• Pirates: 65 letters, responding to coverage of the pirate crisis off the coast of Africa;
• John Yoo: 37 letters, reflecting on this Op-Ed and this Op-Ed debating whether former Justice Department official Yoo -- one of the authors of the infamous Bush administration ‘torture memos’ -- should or should not be allowed to teach law at Chapman University, where he’s currently a visiting professor; and
• Rosa Brooks: 29 letters, commenting on the columnist’s last piece for The Times and her new job at the Defense Department.

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 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. Faxes and snail mail are not reflected in the chart.

For more on The Times’ letters process, visit our Letters FAQ online.