One comment - the perfect pitch exercise becomes a relative pitch exercise as soon as you get one note right. I don't believe I have perfect pitch but I got 100% on the quiz I just did.
I don't think it's a crackpot theory. The basic idea is that the gauge group is the group of rescalings of the units of money, and arbitrage appears as curvature in the gauge field, i.e. you end up with a net change when you parallel-transport money around a loop in the (discrete) space of assets and time.
Am I the only one who just doesn't find this very interesting? I mean it's just a coincidence that "buffalo" is a verb in American English and also a place name, as well as an animal.
I just don't think this leads anywhere interesting.
You could look at the LRB (London Review of Books). While obviously it is mostly book reviews there are other essays in there too. The writing is rather literary, which may or may not be a positive, but it is entirely free of clickbait. It's probably the nearest thing to a left-wing equivalent of The Economist.
I have recently bailed too - I was subjected to multiple exit interviews when cancelling my subscription (two online and one over the phone). This certainly put me right off resubscribing at any point in the future.