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Opinion L.A.

Opinion: The Letters Top Five

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During the week ending April 25, The Times received 655 usable letters, 336 of which were in our Top Five Topics. Fallout from the Bush Administration torture memos dominated our mailbag, making up more than a quarter of the usable mail we received.

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  • Torture:

    • 169 letters, reacting to Times coverage of the CIA’s harsh interrogation techniques;

  • Pirates: 54 letters, on the pirates off the coast of Africa;
  • Obama in Latin America: 47 letters, responding to this article and this article, as well as others, about Obama’s travels the previous week;
  • Jews, genes, and IQ: 43 letters, reacting to this Column One story about the link between IQ and genetics in European Jews; and

  • Villaraigosa’s budget: 23 letters, responding to this piece about the mayor’s budget proposal. Many letter writers were bothered by the mayor’s calling some veteran city employees ‘deadwood’. 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.

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