Patrick Smith's Mailbag

By Patrick Smith

What's up in the mail room? The mail, for one thing: our letter writers are setting a torrid pace so far this year. The first-quarter total was an eye-glazing 18,806 letters, e-mails and faxes (and yes, we read every blessed one of them, and some of them twice). For you real numbers junkies, that's 8% more than what we bagged this time last year.

--SCANDALS HAVE THEIR GOOD POINTS: At least from a letters-count perspective. The more President Clinton got into hot water and the more Kenneth Starr investigated, the more readers wanted to sound off. Monicagate was a major factor in the volume of mail we got this year and last. Here's a comparison of each year's Top Four letter-getting cover stories through March.

FIRST QUARTER '99

MEN OF THE YEAR, CLINTON & STARR Dec. 28/Jan. 4, 1,510 REVIEW OF CLINTON SCANDAL Feb. 22, 927 MONICA LEWINSKY March 15, 827 MILLENIUM MADNESS Jan. 18, 731

FIRST QUARTER '98

MONICA AND BILL Feb. 2, 2,327 TIME AT 75 March 9, 851 KENNETH STARR Feb. 9, 770 PAULA JONES March 23, 620

--ODD REQUEST: "Who were the last 50 of TIME's Men of the Year? More specifically, who among them was bald?" Perhaps this reader's question means we should be prepared for a very specialized achievers list: the Top Chrome Domes of the Century. Although we would not be very comfortable flatly asserting that the following Men of the Year were bald, it would be safe to say they were balding or, better yet, follicularly challenged: Gandhi, Churchill, Eisenhower, Truman, Mossadegh, Khrushchev, Pope John XXIII, Sadat, Gorbachev, De Klerk and Pope John Paul II.

Best Opening Lines of Recent Letters

"I have retired and now have e-mail, and so I am let loose upon the world."

"This e-mail is in response to a specific issue that we cannot recall."

"As you've probably guessed, I am a very strange person."

When our covers pose a provocative question, readers are only too happy to supply answers--by the ton, as these totals attest.

THE BOX SCORE We Asked For It

1. Is God Dead? April 8, 1966 3,430 2. Who Was Jesus? Aug. 15, 1988 2,121 3. Is Feminism Dead? June 29, 1998 2,004 4. Whose America? July 8, 1991 787 5. Is Freud Dead? Nov. 29, 1993 685