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The first tenants have moved into an apartment building at 281 Franklin Street in Downtown Boston — a former office building now converted as part of the city’s initiative to transform old office spaces into homes, GBH’s Liz Neisloss reports.

“You just have so much within walking distance. Easy access to all of the different MBTA lines,” said George Giunta, “and I do think that it has, like, a little bit of a neighborhood-ly feel.”

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu also stopped by to give Giunta and Ernestine Tiongsen a snake plant as a housewarming present. “The only way we’re going to have everything come back fully downtown is to convert to more of a residential neighborhood,” Wu said. “We want there to be amenities, we want there to be people who are working from home, but home is downtown. Home is supporting the small businesses in this area.”

Tiongsen said they signed the lease before construction was even finished, and that she loved the exposed beams and other finishes that remained from the building’s former life.

“That’s what all these buildings are about, is reusing what’s there and kind of envisioning how somebody can live in the space without changing too much,” developer Adam Burns told them. “Adaptive reuse is about reuse, at the end of the day.”

Four Things to Know

1. A judge in Boston ruled that State Treasurer Deborah Goldberg improperly fired Cannabis Control Commission Chair Shannon O’Brien in 2024. Goldberg had said O’Brien created a hostile work environment and said insensitive things.

“The question before the Court is not whether the Plaintiff was abrasive, boorish, inconsiderate, ill-tempered, imprudent and/or otherwise unreasonable — either in actuality or in the reasonable estimation of the Treasurer,” Judge Robert Gordon wrote. “Those are simply not grounds that clear the high bar for removal set by the terms of the statute.” Gordon ruled that O’Brien should be immediately reinstated to the commission.

2. Boston City Councilor Brian Worrell is pushing for a Historically Black College or University to open a satellite campus in Boston. 

“This is the mecca of education, and I believe that an HBCU should have a presence,” he said. “HBCUs make up a large share of our Black talent; 40% of Black engineers, 50% of Black doctors and lawyers, 70% of Black dentists — those are the individuals that we want here in Boston, and to be able to plug them into the fields where we, as a Black community, have been underrepresented.”

3. Attention, Green Line passengers: today marks the start of a nine-day-long shutdown of the D branch, from Kenmore all the way to Riverside. Expect shuttle buses along the route, except the Beaconsfield stop, which is about 0.2 miles away from the C branch’s Dean Road stop.

The shutdown will allow the MBTA to install a system they hope will prevent train collisions. Normal service will resume Sept. 12.

4. The first phase of improvements on Chandler Pond in Brighton, which has gone from a manmade pond used for harvesting ice in the 19th-century to a park, is now complete. Workers have made the pond’s slopes more stable, added native plants and weeded out some invasive varieties.

“These improvements protect the pond’s ecological health, enhance the visitor experience and set the stage for ongoing water quality monitoring and long-term resilience,” interim parks and recreation head Cathy Baker-Eclipse said.

With AI common on campus, some educators are leaning in

GBH’s education reporter, Kirk Carapezza, has a look at a generative AI chatbot one Harvard lecturer built to help teach his physics curriculum. Greg Kestin said he uses his tool, TeachGPT, as a sort of add-on to his classes.

“I never am intending to replace anyone, but sort of take some of the more rote aspects of teaching and let the AI do that,” he said. “I’m using AI as a tool that’s informed by the way that I would teach.”

So is a generative AI tutor an effective way to learn? Kestin ran a small study that split students into two groups — those who only learned the material in a class and those who used an AI tutor to teach the same material — then quizzed all students on what they learned. Students in the AI tutor group did better on average on the quiz, he said.

That might sound exciting to people looking to make education less expensive, or to scale lessons to larger numbers of students. But like anything else, there are other factors to consider.

“There’s much more that goes on in a classroom besides tutoring and information being fed at you from a screen,” said Katie Shilton, a tech ethics professor at the University of Maryland in College Park. “Those things are not replaceable in the ways that chatbots work right now.”

Kestin told Carapezza that he agrees.

“I don’t encourage anyone to just put a chatbot in the classroom,” he said. “They do just get to the end result rather than thinking through it.”

You can read the full, human-generated story here.