WIRED's Most Popular Stories of the Year

When a school in Palo Alto, California, expelled a sixth grader because DNA tests showed he carries the genetic markers for cystic fibrosis, his parents sued, alleging genetic discrimination. That's right. Genetic discrimination. As Sarah Zhang explains in "DNA Got a Kid Kicked Out of School---And It'll Happen Again," the rise of cheap DNA tests means discrimination, and lawsuits, will become more common.

Until now, the best answer to the question "What phone should I get" almost always was "An iPhone." Not anymore. David Pierce makes a convincing case that Google Pixel Is the Best Phone on the Planet.

The odds are you use Dropbox. Some 500 million people do. And the odds are you give it absolutely no thought. It just works. But the service is built atop a vast infrastructure, one that until recently lived on Amazon's servers. Earlier this year, Dropbox completed a massive migration to a system it designs and runs, a Herculean engineering challenge that Cade Metz recounts in The Epic Story of Dropbox's Exodus from the Amazon Butt Empire.

At some point in the not-to-distant past, you've looked at all the apps running on your phone and started swiping swiping swiping them closed in a frantic bid to preserve your battery. Admit it. Well, you can stop, because, as David Pierce notes in Closing Apps to Save Your Battery Only Makes Things Worse, you're wasting your time. Seriously. Just stop.

The Tesla Model 3 is more than a sleek electric car. It's the car that will make or break Tesla Motors and Elon Musk's dream of electrifying transportation. Alex Davies was at Tesla when Musk unveiled that car, and explains just why it is so important in "Meet Tesla's Model 3, Its Long-Awaited Car for the Masses."

FBI James Comey sparked a firestorm of controversy when he announced on October 28 that the bureau was investigating a new cache of emails from Hillary Clinton's campaign. And then he drew heat from the You-Know-Who campaign when, eight days later, he said a review of those emails found nothing to warrant prosecution. The You-Know-Who campaign questioned the agency's ability to thoroughly review so many emails. But Andy Greenberg explained that, Yes, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, the FBI Can Vet 650,000 Emails in Three Days."

Magic Leap is not the only company developing mixed-reality technology, but it certainly is the most mysterious. Not much is known about it, or the technology it is developing. Yes, an expose by The Information argues that Magic Leap and its founder, Rony Abovitz, have overhyped both its product and its timeline. But "The Untold Story of Magic Leap, The World's Most Secretive Startup" by Kevin Kelly is a fascinating history of virtual reality and the company that just might make mixed reality a reality.

Trying to psychoanalyze Julian Assange and discern the motives behind WikiLeaks constant disclosures became a popular pastime during the 2016 presidential campaign. But all you need to do is read "a crappy, annoying manifesto" Assange wrote, because as Andy Greenberg noted in "Want to Know Julian Assange's Endgame? He Told You a Decade Ago," there's really no mystery to it.