Well the template is parsed to the end which means it's correct; list is not generating any results, probably statistics for article reads are not collected.
There are two ways to turn on article stats (number of reads, that are used to calculate popularity) - in Configure -> System preferences check 'Automatic collection of statistics' and also for your article type, for example 'news', for field 'full_text' (or whatever is your main content field) check 'is_content' switch. The other, non-automatic way of collecting stats, is to put {{ count }} command somewhere in your article template.
-- Ljuba Rankovic Senior Front End Developer, Sourcefabric ljuba.rankovic@sourcefabric.org
{{ count }} is the way to manually - in template - trigger stats collecting because automatic way generates some javascript code in full_text field that then makes this field to validate as non-empty even if it is empty.
List doesn't return anythnig so it should be debugged; try other options (byComments, byLastComment) - does it return anyhnig? Do you have more publications on this instance? Try to force the context of the listed articles (ignore_issue, set_current_issue, set_publication identifier="XX") and report back the results of your testing
-- Ljuba Rankovic Senior Front End Developer, Sourcefabric ljuba.rankovic@sourcefabric.org