“This movie really inspired,” said Ms. Paul’s husband, Dennis Paul. Food, Inc., which opens in New York, Los Angles and San Francisco on Friday, June 12, is another in-depth probe of the dark secrets behind the food industry. It's chock-full of delicious tidbits: Did you know that tomatoes are picked green halfway around the world and ripened with ethylene gas before they make it into your tummy? Or that ammonia is used in beef processing?

The most shocked reaction from the well-heeled private audience came when the screen flashed the average annual income of chicken farmers: $18,000. Cries of “Oh, Jesus,” and “Jesus Christ!” were heard.

React to Film will pre-screen films about issues ranging from overfishing the oceans to child slavery and trafficking, offering Q&A sessions with filmmakers and a cocktail hour at each event. The goal, Ms. Paul said, is to “keep the dialogue going after people leave the movie.” On why she wanted to start the series, she further elaborated: “There’s really no platform for documentary films, especially issue-based documentaries … I’m not a 20-year-old who doesn’t care anymore—I’ve got to leave this world to my kids!”

After the movie, actress Samantha Mathis thanked Mr. Schlosser for “helping to get this movie made,” while publicist Peggy Siegal (“I just got my lips done!”) nodded off. “I don’t really care about food," Mr. Schlosser said."What’s really at the heart of it is … power and what happens when power gets corrupted.” Still, the California native makes it to local farmers' markets about once a week. What does he like to eat in New York? “I try to avoid eating at fast-food and chain restaurants, especially in New York, that’s just sinful! This really is the greatest city in the world for food.”

After the screening, ABC’s John Stossel popped by for the cocktail hour, where guests, including Prince Philippos of Greece, sipped cocktails and grassy-looking health drinks.

Co-host Katie Lee Joel gushed about her favorite places to get local food: “the Union Square greenmarket, the Abington Square greenmarket, in the Hamptons there’s the Green Thumb, and Pike's.” What does she think about the First Couple eating at locavore eatery Blue Hill? “They were definitely making a political statement with that choice!”

Ms. Mathis, who just moved to New York from California, said she hadn't gotten around to trying Blue Hill, but loves Robert De Niro’s new venture, Locanda Verde. “It’s spectacular! The extent to which it’s local or organic, I don’t know, but I will be asking.”

Bowery Hotel owner Sean MacPherson, meanwhile, split soon after seeing the film. Perhaps he lost his appetite.

“Mort and I are far from retiring,” Lynn Nesbit said on Friday afternoon. “It isn’t a question on the table at the moment. It really isn’t.”

The night before, one of the stars at the boutique literary agency Ms. Nesbit runs with Mort Janklow abruptly announced that he was leaving for a job at the global, multiplatform talent agency William Morris. Eric Simonoff, who represents Pulitzer Prize-winner Jhumpa Lahiri and others, had spent 18 years at Janklow & Nesbit. Apart from a stint as an assistant at Norton the year after he graduated from college, it was the only job he’d ever had. At 41, he was widely thought to be the prince of the firm, in line to one day take over for Ms. Nesbit and Mr. Janklow alongside his equally heavy-hitting colleague, Tina Bennett.

Precisely what such a takeover would potentially entail depends on who you ask, but until last week, the consensus assumption among publishing people was that the agency’s namesakes, 78-year-old Mort and 70-year-old Lynn, had been deliberately grooming Mr. Simonoff and Ms. Bennett, and would hand the reins to the agency over to them when they got tired of steering it. 

Because of this, many found Mr. Simonoff’s sudden defection puzzling, and the motivations behind it have been intensely debated.

Though Mr. Simonoff could not be reached for comment, Ms. Nesbit said Friday it wasn’t really so complicated at all.

"I think what provoked him is the huge financial offer,” she said. “I think it’s as simple as money. He said they made him an offer he felt he could not refuse.” 

She added, “He’ll be the only alpha male in William Morris's literary department.”

Suzanne Gluck and Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, co-heads of the William Morris literary department, announced their new hire on Friday just as all of publishing prepared to pack into the New School’s Tishman Auditorium for the National Book Critics Circle Awards. The news appeared on The New York Times’ ArtsBeat blog under the headline, “A Star Book Agent’s New Home.” Therein, Ms. Gluck was quoted as saying Mr. Simonoff had been her “dream date” for years.

Three well-placed sources who would not speak for attribution said Ms. Gluck and Ms. Walsh (neither of whom would comment for this article) had been actively looking to add someone of Mr. Simonoff's stature to their ranks for several years. Several industry people—knowledgeable ones, the lot of them, though obviously all too shy to speak on the record—said William Morris could use someone with literary sensibilities who can hit home runs with titles that skew more commercial than the high quality (but often narrowly targeted) stuff that Bill Clegg tends to do.

Publishing people were giddy when they heard about Mr. Simonoff's job change last week, and not even because they were happy for him—though some were—but because it was surprising, and exciting, and an undeniable show of force by William Morris that no one really knew how to explain off the top of their heads. Editors, publishers, agents, everyone wanted to talk about it, and they got into work on Friday still drunk on the news and excited to start calling and emailing one another about it. People asked if a “dominant theory” had emerged, the question invariably coming out sounding hopeful, but also cautious, because no one really wanted the fun to end.

The last time anyone felt this way was in June, when News Corp. fired Jane Friedman. With all that had happened since—the wrenching reorganization of Random House, the closing of Collins—that felt like a lifetime ago. 

"Was I shocked? No,” Ms. Nesbit said on Friday. “I was surprised but not shocked. I think Eric has to spread his wings. Maybe it was all too much like family."

But what exactly was behind Mr. Simonoff’s defection? His colleagues in the industry were left scratching their heads over the weekend.

“There had to have been something material that prompted it,” one editor said. “It’s not something you would do just for the sake of it ‘I just want a change’— agents don’t do it.”

Was it as Ms. Nesbit said? Had William Morris just offered Mr. Simonoff a dizzying amount of money? Or was there more at work—like, say, unresolved succession issues at Janklow & Nesbit that might have caused the famously ambitious agent to lose his patience with the firm and seek out something more secure? 

In a sense, there are two stories here, one about why Mr. Simonoff is joining William Morris, and the other about why he is leaving Janklow.

One theory is that he was tempted by all the perks that come with working for a large multimedia talent agency—namely, access to in-house film and TV agents who can help him not only by selling his adaptation-ready literary properties but also by giving him business whenever one of their celebrity clients wants to write a book.

In an interview Friday, former William Morris literary head Owen Laster, who retired from the firm after 46 years in 2006, said many of the opportunities a large organization with many branches offers are simply not possible at a small, prestige shop like Janklow & Nesbit. He offered that when he was agenting at WMA, he “personally handled many film and television deals” for his clients, and “very often” collaborated with people in other parts of the company.

“That office [Janklow & Nesbitt], although primarily literary, has a pretty wide base, but not like William Morris,” Mr. Laster said. “Their connection with CAA and other offices gives them power in those areas, but at William Morris it’s more direct—it’s our clients.” 

While the possibility of multimedia domination may have certainly appealed to Mr. Simonoff, the real reason behind his decision to leave his longtime home probably had a lot more to do with the murky question of succession at Janklow & Nesbit and the sense of uncertainty that is clouding the agency’s future. 

For one thing, Mr. Janklow is said to have thought seriously about selling the company over the years—and though he has denied it, he has reportedly put a price tag on it that was rebuffed by potential buyers. For another, there is the matter of Mr. Janklow’s 41-year-old son Luke, a former rock singer and current restaurant owner who has in recent years been doing some agenting for his father's shop, and Ms. Nesbit’s daughter Priscilla Gilman—a recovering English professor who recently returned from a nine-month leave of absence during which she wrote a memoir about motherhood.   

Did the presence of the young Mr. Janklow and Ms. Gilman signal to Mr. Simonoff that the agency would always remain a family business? That all the loyalty in the world wasn’t going to make it any more likely that he'd ever be made partner?

Nonsense, according to Ms. Nesbit: “I don’t think it was about succession," she said. "I honestly, genuinely do not think it was about that."

"I think Luke has many strings to his bow,” she added, referring to the young Mr. Janklow’s various non-literary pursuits, which also includes collecting guitars and cars. “I have a very strong alpha male here, you see, in Mort Janklow. Eric felt more comfortable with another younger guy here. I don’t think Luke and Priscilla were in any way a threat to him.”

Regardless of why it happened, Mr. Simonoff’s departure unmistakably leaves Janklow & Nesbit with a future even more uncertain than the one it was already looking forward to, especially considering that whatever finally convinced Mr. Simonoff to flee could conceivably convince Ms. Bennett to do the same.

Several people noted that Ms. Bennett and Mr. Simonoff are the only major players at the agency bringing in new clients and making spectacular sales with any regularity (Update, 5:15PM: It should be noted that just two weeks ago, Ms. Nesbit placed the journalist Andrew Meier's The House of Morgenthau with Random House, and before that sold a memoir by young Iraq veteran Christopher Brownfield to Knopf). Mr. Simonoff has Ms. Lahiri and Edward P. Jones, for example, and in January, he showed his muscle when he sold Danielle Trussoni’s debut novel Angelology in a hotly contested auction for nearly $1 million. Ms. Bennett, in turn, represents Malcolm Gladwell, Fareed Zakaria, Laura Hillenbrand, Eric Schlosser and many others. Sure, the elder Mr. Janklow can still do a multimillion-dollar eight-book deal for Danielle Steele with his eyes closed when he wants to, and Ms. Nesbit is still putting up dizzying numbers with her Tom Wolfe and her Anne Rice sales. But as one publisher put it, “they’re not taking on new people. What’s the future?” 

That publisher, along with other executives, speculated on Friday about whether Mr. Simonoff’s departure might inspire Ms. Bennett to look for other work, or whether it would instead have the effect of forcing some of the succession issues at the agency to the fore.  

Though unlikely, Ms. Bennett could conceivably follow Mr. Simonoff to William Morris. Said one knowledgeable agent, “Jennifer Walsh used to say, 'I'll get Tina Bennett over here—Watch me.’”

Ms. Nesbit sounded cool as a cucumber when confronted with that scenario Friday. "I expect Tina to be here forever,” she said.

Ms. Bennett declined to comment for this article.

The critics received Mr. Foer’s book politely, perhaps caught off-guard (or embarrassed) by all of the ferment—neo-Nazis, racism, sectarian violence, nationalism—going on under their Malbec-sniffing, globalized noses, often in places where they’d spent delightful vacations. The book gained momentum, cited here, talked about there, the intelligentsia fascinated by all the geopolitical subtexts. This was better water-cooler talk, suddenly, than endless debates about the double switch or the precious Red Sox.

They’d discovered something new (though it had been around since the 1860’s). Despite the holes and the generalizations, How Soccer Explains the World gave the sport intellectual ballast, the kind only baseball, boxing and, to a lesser degree, the ponies had known. Once the province of ignored immigrants on the one end and pushy suburbanites on the other, with a passionate band of misfits marooned in between, soccer was now in the hands, or at the feet, of the literati and media elite. It’s “their thing” now—the great egalitarian game hijacked.

And right on cue, further evidence of this shift: The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup, edited by Matt Weiland, an editor at Granta and before that at The Baffler, and Sean Wilsey, author of the memoir Oh the Glory of It All. (An afterword is provided by Mr. Foer, the movement’s “number 10.”) The idea is straightforward enough: have 32 writers each contribute an essay on one of the 32 teams that have qualified for the World Cup. The editors have added to the package vital statistics on each country—population, capital city, G.D.P. per capita, median age—sourced (here we detect the influence of McSweeney’s, where Mr. Wilsey is an editor at large) from the C.I.A.’s World Factbook.

Among the contributors are Geoff Dyer, Dave Eggers, Nick Hornby, Tim Parks, John Lanchester, Eric Schlosser and James Surowiecki—a talented crew. But how were they chosen—and why? Well, it’s easy to second-guess any lineup (for a starting 11 or a literary anthology), but some of the choices here would make Sócrates—the lanky, chain-smoking Brazilian midfield legend of the 1982 and 1986 World Cups, lovingly cited a couple of times in the book—reach for the Marlboro Reds.

Most of the contributors seem to have only a passing interest in soccer, or none at all. Several of them have a connection to Granta or McSweeney’s or The New Yorker, where Mr. Wilsey once worked. The editors would no doubt argue that love or knowledge of the sport doesn’t matter. Maybe, but the best piece, almost predictably, is Nick Hornby’s (on England)—isn’t that because every sentence is informed by his life with the game?

Some of the non-soccer enthusiasts, like Peter Stamm (Switzerland), write perceptive essays. Mr. Stamm admits that he hasn’t watched a game in almost 20 years; but he knows the Swiss character, its ambivalence and provincialism. (He’s Swiss.) Having Eric Schlosser, certainly a bold journalist, write about Sweden—or rather, the Swedish prison system—is a wasted opportunity. (I’d rather have read Björn Ulvaeus’ take.) So is having a Swede, Henning Mankell, who lives in Mozambique, write on Angola (like Mozambique, a former Portuguese colony).

Geoff Dyer, author of a wonderful book on jazz, But Beautiful (1991), writes about Serbia and Montenegro, but he barely mentions soccer, preferring instead to talk about the traffic in Belgrade. “How does this translate into football?” he asks. “Packing the midfield? Playing for a draw and hoping to sneak through in injury time—as the amber turns to red, so to speak—or on penalties?” Why not Peter Maass, author of Love Thy Neighbor? Or why not be daring and go with Peter Handke, the Austrian playwright and novelist, author of The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1970), whose fascination, and sympathy, for Serbia got his work banned by a prominent French theater company last month?

Even though The Thinking Fan’s Guide has an Anglo bent, conspicuously absent are David Winner and Alex Bellos, two British writers, both of whom have explored the inextricable links between soccer and Dutch and Brazilian society. (Their books, filled with wit and rich with history, are cited by other contributors.) Where’s Rob Hughes of the London Times? Cranky old Brian Glanville? And Paul Gardner, the British expat now living in America?

Of course it’s easy to come up with a dream team, harder to make it happen.

In How Soccer Explains the World, Mr. Foer, now the editor of The New Republic, shrewdly talks about his frustration with America’s “yuppie soccer fans”—the “soccer cognoscenti”—and how they’re “inveterate snobs.” It’s almost as if he wanted to preempt similar criticism—after all, this is a writer who cites Abbas Kiarostami, Isaiah Berlin and Antonio Gramsci. I loved A Taste of Cherry, but who, you wonder, is calling whom a snob?

The Thinking Fan’s Guide suggests this same kind of shielded elitism. It doesn’t feel like a sincere quest to share an appreciation of the game and all that surrounds it; it feels more like showing off to impress really smart friends. It feels clubby, not inclusive.

Parts of the book are what they should be: surprising, informed, erudite, funny. Here’s Mr. Eggers, writing about the U.S. team: “When I was thirteen—this was 1983, long before glasnost, let alone the fall of the wall—I had a gym teacher, whom for now we’ll call Moron McCheeby, who made a very compelling link between soccer and the architects of the Iron Curtain.” And Mr. Foer’s afterword—on political regimes and World Cup winners—is more original and rollicking than anything in his own book. But too many of the essays either think too hard or wander helplessly into irrelevance, or both.

Is it schoolmarmish to point out—contrary to Mr. Weiland’s assertion in the preface to The Thinking Fan’s Guide—that no, England did not wear black shorts in 1982 (or ever); that Argentina did not get eliminated in the first round of the 1994 World Cup; that the famous Northern Irish keeper was Pat Jennings, not Pat Jenkins; that the Frenchman who missed the penalty in the epic 1982 semifinal was Maxime Bossis (a veteran of three World Cups), not Diego Bosis?

Soccer is known by the poetic, though now shopworn, moniker “the beautiful game.” But it’s also, to borrow the title of Paul Gardner’s knowing history, the simplest game. As Pelé explained in the beloved movie Victory, “I do dis, dis, dis, dis, dis … goal.”

Michael J. Agovino, a writer and editor living in New York and Zurich, is at work on his first book.

Eric Schlosser, author of the muckraking instant classic Fast Food Nation , has returned with a collection of three new exposés. In the earlier book, Mr. Schlosser took the simple, ubiquitous hamburger patty and traced out the damage it has wrought on the American landscape. In Reefer Madness , Mr. Schlosser picks three other American favorites-marijuana, strawberries and porn-as entry points into America's vast underground economy. The black market has apparently doubled in size over the last 30 years, and may now be as large as $1 trillion, or roughly 10 percent of the G.D.P.; it represents, according to Mr. Schlosser, a kind of royal road to the American political unconscious.

As a reporter, Mr. Schlosser still possesses great legs, a sharp eye and an instinctive grasp of intricate social realities; and Reefer Madness is filled with the sort of rapier factoid that helped make Fast Food Nation a blockbuster. But he's a more openly polemical writer this time around, in possession of a darker vision of American hypocrisy. "The enormity of today's underground," he pronounces somewhat ominously, "reveals the extent to which American society has become alienated and at odds with itself, like a personality beginning to decompose."

The book opens with our peculiar hang-up concerning marijuana. As Mr. Schlosser points out, every statistic indicates that we Americans love our Alice B. Toklas. Of the major narcotics, only marijuana is homegrown-in open fields, camouflaged by surrounding corn, or in clandestine greenhouses, rigged out with blue lights and elaborate hydroponic troughs. Credible estimates for the value of America's annual pot crop range as high as $25 billion-surpassing corn at $19 billion.

Your people call it marijuana. My people call it herb, skunk, giggles, chronic . Over the years, demonizing weed has become a venerable sport of-to use Philip Rahv's old term-"Palefaces" everywhere; but starting in the early 80's, the stakes were ratcheted up precipitously. Playing off swing-voter fears-and once again, when it comes to victimless pleasures, checking their every libertarian scruple at the door-Reagan-era jihadists launched an attack on marijuana, culminating in today's compassion-free mandatory sentencing guidelines. Mr. Schlosser lays out the numbers-10 million arrested, 250,000 of those sent to prison for at least a year-as well as the grim story of one Mark Young, an affable no-account who received a life sentence for being caught on the outer fringes of a pot deal. "A society that can punish a marijuana offender more severely than a murderer," Mr. Schlosser concludes, "is caught in the grip of a deep psychosis."

And so the day of the fully tax-deductible three-blunt lunch is hardly upon us, public rabidity having been so exercised against even modest decriminalization. To wit: In 1981, a young Congressman named Newt Gingrich introduced a bill supporting the medicinal use of marijuana. Fifteen years later, in 1996, House Speaker Gingrich was championing the death penalty for anyone carrying more than two ounces into the country. While getting ever more medieval on your grass, however, elected officials have been busy crafting ever more tear-jerking appeals for their own dope-toting children. Conservative attack dog Dan Burton, another ardent supporter of executing dealers, helped engineer the legal defense of his son after he was caught with eight pounds of marijuana. And Representative Randy (Duke) Cunningham, four months after delivering a blistering anti-drug jeremiad against President Clinton, discovered that his own son had been nabbed with 400 pounds of pot. Fighting back tears, Mr. Cunningham testified, "My son has a good heart" (not to mention one killer case of the munchies.) In an atmosphere of hang 'em high, both children somehow got away with exceedingly merciful sentences.

"Innocent as strawberries," the poet Dylan Thomas once wrote-but, alas, not so innocent after all. On the silver screen, California has manufactured a junk aristocracy; out in the fields, it cultivates a modern peasantry. Strawberry consumption has boomed over the last 30 years, in large part because strawberries are one of the most profitable row crops. They are, however, Mr. Schlosser tells us, one of the most fragile. Rain tears their delicate skin, frost burns it and mold quickly sets in. As consumers, meanwhile, we prefer our fruit as firm and unblemished as Courteney Cox. And so entire crops go to waste, a cost that has been assiduously passed down to the lowest rung, the farmworker, who has been cleverly set up as an independent operator. In one stroke, agribusiness avoids labor and immigration laws and transfers business risk to its own workers. The result is a grotesque admixture of an entrepreneurial rhetoric of hope with the feudal reality of sharecropping.

If marijuana is illegal but relatively harmless, and strawberries are legal but devastating to the workers who produce them, then pornography seems to occupy every ambivalent niche in between. Mr. Schlosser again takes up an industry that has exploded over roughly the last 30 years, from its origins in trench-coated despair to honeymooners dialing up Pamela and Tommy Lee on the hotel pay-per-view. His way into the world of retail salacity is a man named Reuben Sturman, whose shady empire dominated the seediest end of the business: coin-op peep shows and adult bookstores. A variation on that one-man stock character known as Larry Flynt, Mr. Sturman fought the U.S. government for a generation. But as Mr. Schlosser is too smart either to sanctify or moralize, the chapter never coalesces strongly enough around a central indignation. His reporting is once again painstaking-he seems intent on dragging us through every hard-luck day and boogie night in the history of Mr. Sturman's business-and his eye for bad faith and cant remains sharp. But in the end, public morality has relaxed (or collapsed, depending on your point of view), a burgeoning nation of carefree Portnoys and Portnoyettes has emerged, and the old obscenity battles have started to seem dreary.

Nonetheless, with Reefer Madness Mr. Schlosser has consolidated his position as America's premiere post-theoretical muckraker. Setting himself up at the crossroads of commodity and taboo, he has taken hold of the most important question a journalist can ask: In a world filled mostly with strangers, what do we owe one another? In the end, Reefer Madness is a social history, dating from roughly January 1981, when the Reagan White House took down the portrait of Thomas Jefferson from the Cabinet Room and replaced it with one of Calvin Coolidge. Since then, both the breathtaking shallows of Coolidge's intellect and his love of unfettered markets have set the standard for our political life. But something else has been brewing. As Mr. Schlosser puts it, "If the market does indeed embody the sum of all human wishes, then the secret ones are just as important as the ones that are openly displayed."

Stephen Metcalf reviews books regularly for The Observer.