During the week ending April 11, The Times received a rather sparse 430 usable letters -- perhaps spring break is slowing writers down -- just 134 of which were in our Top Five Topics.

• Limbaugh challenge: 39 letters, reacting to four essays from prominent local liberals accepting Andrew Klavan's Limbaugh Challenge;
• Obama's trip: 31 letters, about President Obama's swing through Europe and the Near East;
• Binghamton shootings: 26 letters, reacting to a tragic shooting spree in an upstate New York immigrant center;
• Ana's story: 20 letters, responding to Times reporter Thomas Curwen's two-part series about neurofibromatosis sufferer Ana Rodarte; and
• North Korean rocket: 18 letters, focusing on North Korea's rocket launch and what it means for the world.

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.