Each week, Letters to the Editor 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 we cut 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,) we usually are left with several hundred eligible items, from which we select the somewhere around 100 that get published in the newspaper.

Last week we received 662 usable letters, 463 of which were in our Top Five Topics:

Sarah Palin: 177 letters. Palin leads the pack for the third week in a row, but her margin of victory is narrowing;

The Metrolink disaster: 137 letters, including responses to general coverage and to this story about former Metrolink spokeswoman Denise Tyrrell;

Other presidential election: 80 letters responding to articles about John McCain, Barack Obama and the campaign;

The economy: 36 letters, mostly focused on the government's bailout of AIG (and its non-bailout of Lehman Brothers);

and

Arts education: 33 letters, reacting to this editorial about a Rand Corp. study on education and the arts.