There was none of the old swagger at Citigroup headquarters on Friday. The bonus checks had landed — and some of the bankers were grumbling.

After a year of yawning losses at the company, employees lamented that times were getting lean. The giant bank, the recipient of two multibillion-dollar rescues from Washington, had paid out only about $4 billion in bonuses.

Only?

If you’ve never worked on Wall Street, it is hard to wrap your head around the idea that a company that lost nearly $19 billion in a single year, as Citigroup did in 2008, could still pay its employees billions in bonuses. It is probably even harder to believe that some of those employees grumble about it.

“I feel like I got a doorman’s tip, compared to what I got in previous years,” said a 30-something investment banking associate at Citigroup’s offices in Lower Manhattan.

That kind of glum talk is being heard all over Wall Street, where money is the measure and bonuses the ultimate yardstick. To bankers and traders, bonuses, which account for the bulk of their pay, justify those long days and sleepless nights spent crunching numbers or watching bond prices dance across computer screens.

But with everyone from President Obama on down chastising bankers for paying themselves billions in bonuses at a time taxpayer money is propping up the financial industry, once-unthinkable questions are starting to arise. Could bonuses, the stuff of Wall Street dreams, become a thing of the past? Could this decades-old incentive system, born of the private partnerships that once ruled Wall Street, be replaced? If so, by what?

Getting Theirs Cuts Both Ways on Wall Street – NYTimes.com.

MELBOURNE, Australia —The women’s final had finished in less than an hour, and Serena Williams was walking down the hall in Melbourne Park lined with photos of past Australian Open champions, including herself.

Pool photo by Lucas Dawson

Serena Williams won her fourth Australian Open singles title.

Locked in her arms was the large silver, Daphne Akhurst trophy that goes to the women’s champion.

“It’s mine again,” Williams said in a lilting voice.

The American champion got no argument from Dinara Safina on Saturday night. After two weeks of uncertainty about the true state of Williams’s form, suddenly there was none as Williams swept through the first set in 22 minutes. She then rolled most comfortably to her fourth Australian Open singles title and 10th Grand Slam singles title by the lopsided score of 6-0, 6-3.

The victory means that Williams, not Safina, will be number one when the latest rankings are released on Monday.

Serena Williams Holds Australian Trophy, Again – NYTimes.com.

Mosnar Communications, Inc. Public Relations Blog: Russell Simmons to Lead Celebrity Bloggers Named Editor-in-Chief of Global Grind.

African-American Studies Expert Dies

Gloria Harper Dickinson, an African-American professor who was the president of the Association for the study of African American Life and History and international regional director of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, has died. She was 61. The chairwoman of African American studies at the College of New Jersey, Dickinson specialty was the African Diaspora. In 1978, she was named a professor of African American studies at Trenton State College, now the College of New Jersey in Ewing, where she taught until she became ill in the fall, Philly.com reports. She died last Sunday of breast cancer at her home in the Philadelphia suburb of Willingboro, N.J.  The only child of a Merchant Marine and a nurse, Dickinson was raised in Queens, N.Y.; she graduated from Hunter High School in New York. She earned a bachelor’s degree in European history from City College of New York in 1968, and a master’s in 1970 and a doctorate in 1978, both in African American studies, from Howard University. She was an early proponent of media technology in African studies, according to Philly.com. “Gloria introduced a computer in her classroom in 1988,” her husband said. At the time of her death, she was Webmaster for the Association of Black Women Historians. “I’ve always tried to connect with communities of people from African heritage,” Dickinson said before leaving for a trip to France in 2001 to lecture at the U.S. Embassy in Paris and the U.S. Consulate in Strasbourg. Six years earlier, she was among representatives from every continent at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. She spoke on African women’s topics, including equal rights, wages, domestic and political violence, and female circumcision. Kim Pearson, a professor of English at the College of New Jersey, described her friend as “a connoisseur of culture.” She had the “Rolodex from God. She traveled the world and connected people with people,” Pearson said.

African-American Studies Expert Dies | News You Should Know | BET.com.