The “No” story started when The Times’s newsroom was struck by an email thread that went off the rails. The first email, about an upcoming ad campaign, was sent at 12:04 p.m. by someone who works in product, and for some reason it went out to what seemed like the entire company. Then the reply-all responses began: “Please remove me from this list,” “Off please,” “Remove me,” “I don’t belong in here,” et cetera.

As someone who deeply enjoys chaos in all of its darkest forms, I was thrilled. I giddily tweeted in all caps. In an internal chat room where members of the Express Team pitch story ideas and make dumb jokes to each other, I wrote:

Smarter Living: What to do when you’re on a reply-all chain

It would be a one-word story

Nothing

I meant it entirely as a gag for the chat room only. But Jonah Bromwich, a reporter on our team, egged me on: “DO THAT PLEASE.” I thought about it longer, and was excited — and a little surprised — when my editor, Yonette Joseph, signed off on the idea.

I quickly started a file and put in a headline: “What Should You Do When You’re Mistakenly Added to an Email Chain?” I wrote the word “Nothing” in the body text and saved it, but felt we needed a bit more. I wrote two short paragraphs, about 50 words, and shipped it off to Ms. Joseph.

She had the smart idea to remove 98 percent of what I had written. She suggested we tweak the headline to a different question and shorten the body text to simply “No.”