Thanksgiving week was a short one for Letters to the editor, with a total of just 545 usable letters moving through, 242 of which were in our Top Five Topics:

• Proposition 8: 93 letters. Once again, for the fourth week in a row, Proposition 8 led the tally. We received 93 responses to our coverage this week, which included this story about the ongoing court battle and this one about Hollywood's ambivalence on the measure;
• Israel: 51 letters. Our coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including this editorial calling on Israel to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza, generated the next largest amount of mail; 
• Barack Obama: 36 letters;
• The economy: 32 letters; and
• This article about Thanksgiving costumes in Claremont's kindergartens: 30 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.