An exploration of why RSS readers have always looked like email clients, tracing the design decision back to Brent Simmons and NetNewsWire in 2002. The layout was a pragmatic choice to reduce the learning curve by borrowing familiar email UI patterns. The piece argues that this design inheritance also imported email's psychological baggage — unread counts, social debt, the anxiety of a backlog — even though RSS carries none of the same social obligations. Nobody is waiting for you to read your feeds, yet the interface makes it feel like they are.