Awl co-editor Alex Balk's knowledge may be an inch deep, but it is at least a couple of yards wide. Or, let's say, a yard. Two-and-a-half feet for sure. In any event, he's never let a lack of research keep him from answering a question with a tone of absolute certainty. He will happily address your occasional queries in that same spirit.

A reader writes: "could you please do some research and tell me that this is not true. kthnx." [Link directs you to an Australian "60 Minutes" story on research showing that "prolonged use of mobile phones could double the risk of malignant brain tumours."]

Smart Alex responds: Okay. I want you to imagine the following three scenarios:

• You are doing cocaine off the top of a toilet in the bathroom of some terrible club way the hell over in the West 20's with some hot-as-fuck redhead whom you're about to take home for six hours of empty, drug-fuelled orifice filling in spite of the fact that, while she claims she's 19, she's chopping up lines with her Horace Mann Upper Division ID card and you heard her call her mom an hour ago to tell her she was spending the night at her friend Madison's place ("Uh, no, Schwartz. You know I haven't talked to Madison Goldberg since, like, May?"). Also you saw something in her purse that you're pretty sure is medicine for crabs.

• You are in an airplane, cruising 30,000 feet above the Rockies as He's Just Not That Into You plays on the individualized screen in front of your face.

• You are smoking a cigarette.

What do these three things have in common? They are all incredibly enjoyable (or, in the case of the plane ride, incredibly functional; air travel will never be considered enjoyable until they start giving in-flight blowjobs or stop showing movies starring that skank Jennifer Aniston) events that you know you shouldn't be doing but can't resist. Fuck enough 15-year-olds and the laws against statutory rape will eventually catch up with you (also crabs). Flying from New York to L.A. in six hours is great (and so much better than, God forbid, passenger rail), but you've got to figure eventually the laws of physics are going to reassert themselves and bring you plummeting back to earth. And cigarettes? Let's be honest: at this point the Surgeon General's warning should simply read, "Don't act like you don't know."

So. Do cell phones cause brain tumors? Well, let's think about it for a second: You are receiving tiny currents of electricity aimed directly at your head from satellites high above the clouds. You might as well have a giant target right above your ear that says "Brain here." You're probably developing ball cancer as we speak, or, if you're a woman, growing a pair of balls which will then develop cancer. How could cell phones not be responsible for tumors? You're receiving electromagnetic waves in your ear beamed from outer space.

That said, ball cancer and brain tumors are a small price to pay for the convenience of being able to call your friends and tell them you're running late because "there was a sick passenger holding up the trains" when, really, you couldn't tear yourself away from the last fifteen minutes of that Lifetime movie you came upon while idly flipping through the channels before you got ready to get out. Life is all about trade-offs; this seems like a no-brainer. Even if that no-brain is FULL OF CANCEROUS TUMORS.

What else do you wanna know?