T o me, the best first sentence of any piece of journalism is the one in Joan Didion’s 1987 book, Miami , which begins like this: “Havana vanities come to dust in Miami.” I love that sentence and that propulsive first chapter so much that I once sat down to try to figure out how she did it. I looked at the sentences one at a time to assess what purpose each one was serving, and I counted how many of them Didion had needed to accomplish each thing she wanted to accomplish. Then I thought about