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A reader asks: A while back, an employee who reported to me (Im a man) became visibly pregnant soon after she started. But she never brought it up. Not with me, not with HR, not with anyone. I didnt ask her about it, though nearly everyone else in our office asked me. I cringed when I responded since it was obvious she was pregnant but I felt that I needed to protect her privacy. I felt like I was walking around on pins and needles with this very obvious elephant in the room. Her job description included occasionally lifting objects up to 40 pounds, and the only way I treated her differently was that I went out of my way to pick up anything remotely heavy. Eventually, she was put on bed rest and had her baby a week later. She did not return to the organization. The office was a very friendly place, and I know the employees would have loved to have thrown her a baby shower and all those fun things. But I realize I was handed a hot potato, from several different angles. Should I have addressed this directly with her? Or was I fine to ignore it? Green responds: You were right to ignore it, awkward and strange as it felt. Sometimes when people think someone looks obviously pregnant, they actually arent. Sometimes thats just their body shape, even if its new. Other times theyre pregnant but know they wont be carrying the baby to full-term because of a medical situation and dont want to talk about that at work. I know the argument is that the employer needs to plan for the persons maternity leave (or departure in this case). And generally people do eventually announce their pregnancies at work for that reason. But when someone chooses not to, theres usually a reason for that choiceand as a manager Id err on the side of respecting that. After all, other situations can cause someone to suddenly need medical leave without any heads-up or to need to resign without notice, and employers deal with those and make do. Of course, the counterargument to this is that if an employee knew months in advance that theyd need several months off for, say, surgery, and didnt bother to tell anyone until the day before, that would be a problem. But again, we dont know the full story here, most pregnant people do announce their pregnancies, and the fact that she didnt likely indicates she had a reason for wanting privacy. If we get an epidemic of people not announcing their pregnancies until the day before they go on leave, thus leaving employers everywhere in the lurch, we can revisit that, but right now its not typical, its reasonable to assume something was up, and you were right to err on the side of respecting her privacy. One last thing: Its important to note that any concern should be solely confined to the employers ability to plan for the employees sudden absence. The offices interest in giving this person a baby shower is 100% not relevant. If she had wanted that, she would have shared the pregnancy. She didnt, and that matters much more than anyones desire to celebrate with her.
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E-Commerce
With a ring of massive columns and seating for more than 70,000 people, President Donald Trump may be getting the football stadium of his dreams. Renderings have just been released of the proposed design for a new stadium for the Washington Commanders NFL team, and the aesthetic is right in line with an architectural style the Trump administration has been championing with increasing passion. The stadium is an oval of dozens of white columns recalling the classical-influenced architecture of some of the capital’s most recognizable buildings. [Image: HKS] Designed by the architecture firm HKS, the stadium’s concept takes one of the most familiar elements of classical architecturethe columnand turns it into the defining feature of the building. Cascading around the stadium’s perimeter with heights upward of 100 feet, the columns are topped by a concave ellipse, also a marble-like white color, that holds a semi-transparent roof. Glass between the columns offers views into the structure, which would glow from within during events. The stadium’s design is a reflection of the Trump administration’s desire for an official embrace of the classical and neoclassical architecture that has typified federal buildings since the earliest days of the republic. Drawing influence from the columns and pediments abundant in the buildings of ancient Greece and the Roman Empire, this classical architecture style can be seen at the White House, the Capitol Building, and the Supreme Court, among many other buildings across the city and country. It’s a style the Trump administration has sought to reassert as the federal standard, issuing executive orders in both of his terms to make classical architecture the preferred style for new federal projects. The group behind this effort, the National Civic Art Society, has been working for decades to convince national leaders that traditional design, not the modernism that emerged in the postwar years, is the most appropriate style for federal architecture. [Image: HKS] Trump’s architectural preferences Trump, the longtime real estate developer, has made this a key part of his agenda. His desire for more classical architecture has trickled down through Trump appointees to the agency that oversees the design of all significant projects in Washington, D.C., the National Capitol Planning Commission (NCPC). NCPC chair Will Scharf, appointed to the commission in July 2025 by Trump, recently called on officials from the Washington Commanders to ensure the new stadium “incorporates architectural features in keeping with the capital more generallyclassical, neoclassical elements.” Speaking at a recent NCPC meeting, Scharf said, “I think really going back to classical antiquity, arenas and stadiums have played a vital role in the urban cityscape . . . I think there were several decades in American history where we unfortunately really got away from that, much to the detriment of the fan experience.” [Image: HKS] The stadium would sit on the site of the demolished Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium, the team’s former home. That site aligns directly with Washington, D.C.’s L’Enfant Plan, the city’s 1790 urban plan that crisscrossed the area with diagonal axes and carefully configured views of buildings like the Capitol, the Washington Monument, and the White House. Trump’s preference for classical architecture in the capital is beginning to influence development in the city. Under the NCPC’s authority, the stadium project could be its most imposing expression. The design from HKS shows a willingness to play along. In a press release, HKS global venues director Mark A. Williams says the project’s design was guided by its “significance of place.” [Image: HKS] “Monumental in presence, grounded in the L’Enfant Plan, and scaled to the urban fabric of the District, the stadium design will be a bold civic landmark that carries the city’s architectural legacy forward in a way that is confident, dynamic, and unmistakably Washington, D.C.,” he says. It could also become unmistakably Trump, as the president’s architectural preferences reverberate through the capital. (Trump has also called for the stadium to be named after himself.) Construction on the Commanders stadium could start in 2027, with an opening date in 2030, a year after the constitutionally mandated end of Trump’s final term.
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E-Commerce
In 2025, employers cited artificial intelligence as the rationale for nearly 55,000 layoffs at companies like Amazon and Microsoft. And with the new year barely underway, were already seeing a new crop of AI-related job cuts. Citigroup is cutting over a thousand jobs, according to Bloomberg, and in a memo this week, CEO Jane Fraser warned of more layoffs later this year. Over time, we can expect automation, AI and further process simplification to reshape how work gets done, she added. Meanwhile, Meta is conducting more layoffs in its virtual reality division, cutting about 1,500 jobs as part of a broader strategic shift to invest further in AI. Given these reports, many observers have been quick to believe that workers are losing jobs to generative AI. But there is little evidence that automation is displacing workers en masse just yetor even drastically changing how businesses operate. According to a recent analysis by the Brookings Institution and the Budget Lab at Yale University, the proportion of workers in jobs that are ripe for AI disruption has remained steady since ChatGPT launched in 2022. Whats more, there are all kinds of forces shaping the labor market right now, including changes in immigration policy that have curbed employment growth. What we’re seeing overall right now is consistent with a labor market that has been hit with a lot of uncertainty in the macroeconomic environment, says Martha Gimbel, executive director of the Budget Lab. The immigration changes are making it really hard to interpret changes in the jobs numbers. And if you look for any signs of changes that seem to be due to AI, those are not yet showing up. Still, a number of experts have pointed to AI adoption to explain the recent spike in labor productivity, which measures hourly worker output. In the third quarter of 2025, labor productivity climbed by 4.9%, the highest increase in two years. Some economists have speculated this is a sign that the growing adoption of AI across companies may in fact be boosting efficiency, despite the slow rate of hiring in 2025. But Gimbel argues productivity is too noisy a metric to accurately capture the impact of AI, particularly over just one quarter. Productivity growth will be really high or really low in one quarter, she says. And if it fits their preferred narrative, people will jump on that. A single quarter of high productivity should not be seen as a clear indicator of anything, she says, in part because labor productivity is imprecise and vulnerable to measurement error. That has been especially true in recent years because the pandemic threw a wrench in the system that is still being sorted out. You had all these issues with productivity measurement in the pandemic because people largely fired low-wage workers who tend to be less productive, Gimbel says. So you saw this huge jump in productivity, and then it came back down as those people were hired back. Was there actually a change in productivity in the economy? No. Research also shows that while AI might improve efficiency to some extent, it creates additional work that can hamper productivity. A new Workday report found that nearly 40% of the time saved by using AI is lost to rework; on average, workers spend 1.5 weeks annually correcting or otherwise fixing AI-generated content. As for whether AI is eliminating jobs, thats not evident in jobs data just yetand unemployment figures do not reflect any notable changes either. While the most recent jobs report does indicate a marked decline in employment across specific sectors, namely professional and business services, Gimbel says its too soon to say whether any of that is actually due to AI. She says it might take an economic downturn to really see that shift. The place to start looking for the impacts of AI is when we have a recession, she says. That is usually when technological change really takes off. All that said, Gimbel is closely watching sectors that have high adoption of AI, which includes not just tech, but also the arts and education. Even if concerns about AI usage in the workplace are overblown at the moment, workers will certainly start to feel the effects of it in the years to come. It would be unusual for a new technology to have no impact on the labor market, Gimbel says. We just still need to find out how fast, and where.
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