Brent Laminack's dashboard

Can I get a list of most recent stories or most recent topics via the API? the 'most recent' is a functionality I'm used to in RSS feeds. It seems that with the API one has to start with a topic or query to generate stories. I'd like to display the most recent 10 stories or the 10 most recent topics instead. i.e. have daylife tell me what's hot rather than me fishing around for what's hot.